han the rule. The Announcement, delivered in the 12th
century B.C., points out that King Wen, the founder of the Chou dynasty,
had wished for wine to be used only in connexion with sacrifices, and
that divine favours had always been liberally showered upon the people
when such a restriction had been observed. On the other hand, indulgence
in strong drink had invariably attracted divine vengeance, and the fall
and disruption of states had often been traceable to that cause. Even
on sacrificial occasions, drunkenness is to be condemned. "When,
however, you high officials and others have done your duty in
ministering to the aged and to your sovereign, you may then eat to
satiety and drink to elevation." The Announcement winds up with an
ancient maxim, "Do not seek to see yourself reflected in water, but in
others,"--whose base actions should warn you not to commit the same;
adding that those who after a due interval should be unable to give up
intemperate habits would be put to death. It is worth noting, in
concluding this brief notice of China's earliest records, that from
first to last there is no mention whatever of any distant country from
which the "black-haired people" may have originally come; no vestige of
any allusion to any other form of civilization, such as that of
Babylonia, with its cuneiform script and baked-clay tablets, from which
an attempt has been made to derive the native-born civilization of
China. A few odd coincidences sum up the chief argument in favour of
this now discredited theory.

Annals of the Lu state.

The next step lands us on the confines, though scarcely in the domain,
of history properly so called. Among his other literary labours,
Confucius undertook to produce the annals of Lu, his native state; and
beginning with the year 722 B.C., he carried the record down to his
death in 479, after which it was continued for a few years, presumably
by Tso-ch'iu Ming, the shadowy author of the famous Commentary, to
which the text is so deeply indebted for vitality and illumination.
The work of Confucius is known as the _Ch'un Ch'iu_, the Springs and
Autumns, q.d. Annals. It consists of a varying number of brief entries
under each year of the reign of each successive ruler of Lu. The
feudal system, initiated more than four centuries previously, and
consisting of a number of vassal states owning allegiance to a central
suzerain state, had already broken hopelessly down,