function was
to offer sacrifices. The Chinese dictatorship was not hereditary,
or the world might have witnessed an exact parallel to the duplicate
sovereignty in Japan, where one held the power and the other retained
the title for seven hundred years.

In China the shifting of power from hand to hand made those four
centuries an age of diplomacy. Whenever some great baron was suspected
of aspiring to the leadership, combinations were formed to curb his
ambitions; embassies sped from court to court; and armies were
marshalled in the field. Envoys became noted for courage and cunning,
and generals acquired fame by their skill in handling large bodies
of soldiers. Diplomacy became an art, and war a science.

An international code to control the intercourse of states began to
take shape; but the diplomat was not embarrassed by a multiplicity
of rules. In negotiations individual character counted for more than
it does at the present day; nor must it be supposed that in the
absence of our modern artillery there was no room for generalship.
On the contrary, as battles were not decided by the weight of metal,
there was more demand for strategy.

All this was going on in Greece at this very epoch: and, as Plutarch
indulges in parallels, we might point to compeers of Themistocles
and Epaminondas. The cause which in the two countries led to this
state of things was the existence of a family of states with a
common language and similar institutions; but in the Asiatic empire
the theatre was vastly more extensive,
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and the operations in politics and war on a grander scale.

To the honour of the Chinese it must be admitted that they showed
themselves more civilised than the Greeks. The Persian invasion
was provoked by the murder of ambassadors by the Athenians. Of
such an act there is no recorded instance among the warring states
of China. It was reserved for our own day to witness in Peking that
exhibition of Tartar ferocity. The following two typical incidents
from the voluminous chronicles of those times may be appropriately
presented here:

A BRAVE ENVOY

The Prince of Ts'in, a semi-barbarous state in the northwest, answering
to Macedonia in Greece, had offered to give fifteen cities for
a kohinoor, a jewel belonging to the Prince of Chao (not Chou).
Lin Sian Ju was sent to deliver the jewel and to complete the
transaction. The conditions not being complied with, he boldly
put the jewel into his bosom and r