Earth
should be maintained. For in the religion of Heaven there was a close
parallelism between Heaven and Earth, and every omission of a sacrifice,
or failure to offer it in due form, brought down a reaction from Heaven.
For these religious reasons a central ruler was a necessity for the
feudal lords. They needed him also for practical reasons. In the course
of centuries the personal relationship between the various feudal lords
had ceased. Their original kinship and united struggles had long been
forgotten. When the various feudal lords proceeded to subjugate the
territories at a distance from their towns, in order to turn their city
states into genuine territorial states, they came into conflict with
each other. In the course of these struggles for power many of the small
fiefs were simply destroyed. It may fairly be said that not until the
eighth and seventh centuries B.C. did the old garrison towns became real
states. In these circumstances the struggles between the feudal states
called urgently for an arbiter, to settle simple cases, and in more
difficult cases either to try to induce other feudal lords to intervene
or to give sanction to the new situation. These were the only governing
functions of the ruler from the time of the transfer to the second
capital.

5 _Changes in the relative strength of the feudal states_

In these disturbed times China also made changes in her outer frontiers.
When we speak of frontiers in this connection, we must take little
account of the European conception of a frontier. No frontier in that
sense existed in China until her conflict with the European powers. In
the dogma of the Chinese religion of Heaven, all the countries of the
world were subject to the Chinese emperor, the Son of Heaven. Thus there
could be no such thing as other independent states. In practice the
dependence of various regions on the ruler naturally varied: near the
centre, that is to say near the ruler's place of residence, it was most
pronounced; then it gradually diminished in the direction of the
periphery. The feudal lords of the inner territories were already rather
less subordinated than at the centre, and those at a greater distance
scarcely at all; at a still greater distance were territories whose
chieftains regarded themselves as independent, subject only in certain
respects to Chinese overlordship. In such a system it is difficult to
speak of frontiers. In practice there was, of course, a sort