[74] The word may be translated as "a coming together." It is the usual word for a "society" or "club."
[75] Chia miao.
[76] Shên chu.
[77] Huo Ying-ti.
[78] Chi-t'ien.
[79] As an indication of how widely sundered are the theory and practice of East and West in the matter of social organisation, D. G. Ritchie's Natural Rights (1903 ed.), pp. 259-60, may be consulted. "No real or positive equality in social conditions," says that writer, "can be secured so long as individuals are looked at in any respect as members of families, and not in every respect as members of the State alone." Yet in China, where individuals are in almost every respect regarded as members of families, and never dream of claiming to be members of the State alone, there is far greater equality in social conditions than there is in the individualistic States of the West! Let us hope for China's sake that this fact will not be overlooked by those young patriot-reformers who are casting about for ways and means of raising their country in the scale of nations.
[80] The family-system has of course existed in regions other than Asia. "In most of the Greek states and in Rome," says Sir Henry Maine (Ancient Law, 4th ed., p. 128), "there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups out of which the State was at first constituted.... The elementary group is the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the commonwealth." In another place (p. 126) he speaks of "the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of individuals. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was an aggregation of families. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the unit of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the individual." Had Maine been acquainted with the details of the social organisation of the Chinese he would have found a copious source from which to draw illustrations of his thesis, and would have perceived that the family-unit system is not yet to be spoken of as a vanished phase of social development.
[81] "The whole Chinese administrative system is based on the doctrine of filial piety, in its most extended signification of duty to natural parents and also to political parents, as the Emperor's magistrates are to this day familiarly called. China is thus one vast republic of innumerable private families, or petty imperia, within one public family, or general imperium; the organisation consists of a number of self-producing and ever-multiplying independent cells, each maintaining a complete administrative existence apart from the central power. Doubtless, it is this fact which in a large measure accounts for China's indestructibility in the face of so many conquests and revolutions."—Prof. E. H. Parker in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (China Branch), vol. xl. (1909), p. 14.
[82] It must be understood that what is referred to is "custom" rather than law, and that these remarks are not always applicable to the business relations between Chinese and foreigners at the treaty-ports, where commercial intercourse is to a great extent conducted on Western lines. When an English banker declares (as he has declared) that the word of a Chinese is as good as his bond, he is paying a compliment not so much to the character of the Chinese people (who as individuals are no more though perhaps no less trustworthy than average Englishmen), as to the fundamental soundness of the Chinese social system. If that system is subverted, through the efforts either of foreign advisers or of Chinese reformers, the moral results may be disastrous beyond conception. Let there be evolution by all means; not revolution.