he period of vigour immediately
following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol conquest in the
Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the Seventeenth) not only has there
never been any absolutism properly so-called in China, but that apart
from the most meagre and inefficient tax-collecting and some
rough-and-ready policing in and around the cities there has never been
any true governing at all save what the people did for themselves or
what they demanded of the officials as a protection against one another.
Any one who doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which
are the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system, and
which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the country to be
fitly appreciated. To be quite frank, absolutism is a myth coming down
from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly built his _Khanbaligh_
(the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear of modern Peking) and
filled it with his troops who so soon vanished like the snows of winter.
An elaborate pretence, a deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since
those days invested Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never
really possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth
Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the capital a
Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too great and to
whom people and officials owed trembling obedience.

In reality, the office of Emperor was never more than a
politico-religious concept, translated for the benefit of the masses
into socio-economic ordinances. These pronouncements, cast in the form
of periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government; their
purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were designed to
teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor was the High
Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the morality of the Golden
Age, which had been inculcated by all the philosophers since Confucius
and Mencius flourished twenty-five centuries ago, would not only secure
universal happiness but contribute to national greatness.

The office of Emperor was thus heavenly rather than terrestrial, and
suasion, not arms, was the most potent argument used in everyday life.
The amazing reply (_i.e._, amazing to foreigners) made by the great
Emperor K'ang-hsi in the tremendous Eighteenth Century controversy
between the Jesuit and the Dominican missionaries, which ruined the
prospects of