ay increase the misery of the many by trying to force them
into actions contrary to their primeval instincts, but I could not
believe that happiness was to be brought to them by a gospel of
industrialism and forced labour.

Nevertheless, when morning came I resumed the interminable discussions
of the materialistic conception of history and the merits of a truly
popular government. Those with whom I discussed had not seen the
sleeping wanderers, and would not have been interested if they had seen
them, since they were not material for propaganda. But something of that
patient silence had communicated itself to me, something lonely and
unspoken remained in my heart throughout all the comfortable familiar
intellectual talk. And at last I began to feel that all politics are
inspired by a grinning devil, teaching the energetic and quickwitted to
torture submissive populations for the profit of pocket or power or
theory. As we journeyed on, fed by food extracted from the peasants,
protected by an army recruited from among their sons, I wondered what we
had to give them in return. But I found no answer. From time to time I
heard their sad songs or the haunting music of the balalaika; but the
sound mingled with the great silence of the steppes, and left me with a
terrible questioning pain in which Occidental hopefulness grew pale.

It was in this mood that I set out for China to seek a new hope.

CHAPTER II

CHINA BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

Where the Chinese came from is a matter of conjecture. Their early
history is known only from their own annals, which throw no light upon
the question. The Shu-King, one of the Confucian classics (edited, not
composed, by Confucius), begins, like Livy, with legendary accounts of
princes whose virtues and vices are intended to supply edification or
warning to subsequent rulers. Yao and Shun were two model Emperors,
whose date (if any) was somewhere in the third millennium B.C. "The age
of Yao and Shun," in Chinese literature, means what "the Golden Age"
mean with us. It seems certain that, when Chinese history begins, the
Chinese occupied only a small part of what is now China, along the banks
of the Yellow River. They were agricultural, and had already reached a
fairly high level of civilization--much higher than that of any other
part of Eastern Asia. The Yellow River is a fierce and terrible stream,
too swift for navigation, turgid, and full of mud, depositing silt upon
it