anding. But with all the pride or pleasure which we take in
the members of our particular clan, our satisfaction really springs from
viewing them on an autocentric theory of the social system. In our own
eyes we are the star about which, as in Joseph's dream, our relatives
revolve and upon which they help to shed an added lustre. Our Ptolemaic
theory of society is necessitated by our tenacity to the personal
standpoint. This fixed idea of ours causes all else seemingly to
rotate about it. Such an egoistic conception is quite foreign to
our longitudinal antipodes. However much appearances may agree, the
fundamental principles upon which family consideration is based are
widely different in the two hemispheres. For the far-eastern social
universe turns on a patricentric pivot.

Upon the conception of the family as the social and political unit
depends the whole constitution of China. The same theory somewhat
modified constitutes the life-principle of Korea, of Japan, and of their
less advanced cousins who fill the vast centre of the Asiatic continent.
From the emperor on his throne to the common coolie in his hovel it is
the idea of kinship that knits the entire body politic together. The
Empire is one great family; the family is a little empire.

The one developed out of the other. The patriarchal is, as is well
known, probably the oldest political system in the world. All nations
may be said to have experienced such a paternal government, but most
nations outgrew it.

Now the interesting fact about the yellow branch of the human race is,
not that they had so juvenile a constitution, but that they have it;
that it has persisted practically unchanged from prehistoric ages. It
is certainly surprising in this kaleidoscopic world whose pattern is
constantly changing as time merges one combination of its elements
into another, that on the other side of the globe this set should have
remained the same. Yet in spite of the lapse of years, in spite of
the altered conditions of existence, in spite of an immense advance in
civilization, such a primitive state of society has continued there to
the present day, in all its essentials what it was when as nomads the
race forefathers wandered peacefully or otherwise over the plains of
Central Asia. The principle helped them to expand; it has simply cramped
them ever since. For, instead of dissolving like other antiquated views,
it has become, what it was bound to become if it continue