makes the reconstruction of Chinese language before Ch'in very
difficult.

The next requirement for the carrying on of the administration was the
unification of weights and measures and, a surprising thing to us, of
the gauge of the tracks for wagons. In the various feudal states there
had been different weights and measures in use, and this had led to
great difficulties in the centralization of the collection of taxes. The
centre of administration, that is to say the new capital of Ch'in, had
grown through the transfer of nobles and through the enormous size of
the administrative staff into a thickly populated city with very large
requirements of food. The fields of the former state of Ch'in alone
could not feed the city; and the grain supplied in payment of taxation
had to be brought in from far around, partly by cart. The only roads
then existing consisted of deep cart-tracks. If the axles were not of
the same length for all carts, the roads were simply unusable for many
of them. Accordingly a fixed length was laid down for axles. The
advocates of all these reforms were also their beneficiaries, the
merchants.

The first principle of the Legalist school, a principle which had been
applied in Ch'in and which was to be extended to the whole realm, was
that of the training of the population in discipline and obedience, so
that it should become a convenient tool in the hands of the officials.
This requirement was best met by a people composed as far as possible
only of industrious, uneducated, and tax-paying peasants. Scholars and
philosophers were not wanted, in so far as they were not directly
engaged in work commissioned by the state. The Confucianist writings
came under special attack because they kept alive the memory of the old
feudal conditions, preaching the ethic of the old feudal class which had