source for the two-and-a-half centuries with which it
deals.

Rendered alert by this experience, we are able to see and to show that
most of the other later official works of history follow the example of
the _Annals of Spring and Autumn_ in containing things that have been
deliberately falsified. This is especially so in the work called
_T'ung-chien kang-mu_, which was the source of the history of the
Chinese empire translated into French by de Mailla.

Apart from Confucius's criticism of the inadequate capacity of the
emperor of his day, there is discernible, though only in the form of
cryptic hints, a fundamentally important progressive idea. It is that a
nobleman (chuen-tzu) should not be a member of the ruling _elite_ by
right of birth alone, but should be a man of superior moral qualities.
From Confucius on, "chuen-tzu" became to mean "a gentleman".
Consequently, a country should not be ruled by a dynasty based on
inheritance through birth, but by members of the nobility who show
outstanding moral qualification for rulership. That is to say, the rule
should pass from the worthiest to the worthiest, the successor first
passing through a period of probation as a minister of state. In an
unscrupulous falsification of the tradition, Confucius declared that
this principle was followed in early times. It is probably safe to
assume that Confucius had in view here an eventual justification of
claims to rulership of his own.

Thus Confucius undoubtedly had ideas of reform, but he did not interfere
with the foundations of feudalism. For the rest, his system consists
only of a social order and a moral teaching. Metaphysics, logic,
epistemology, i.e. branches of philosophy which played so great a part
in the West, are of no interest to him. Nor can he be described as the
founder of a religion; for the cult of Heaven of which he speaks and
which he takes over existed in exactly the same form before his day. He
is merely the man who first systematized those notions. He had no
successes in his lifetime and gained no recognition; nor did his
disciples or their disciples gain any general recognition; his work did
not become of importance until some three hundred years after his death,
when in the second century B.C. his teaching was adjusted to the new
social conditions: out of a moral system for the decaying feudal society
of the past centuries developed the ethic of the rising social order of
the gentry. The gentry (in much t