immediately involved hold aloof. It is bad manners in China to attack
your adversary in wet weather. Wu-Pei-Fu, I am told, once did it, and
won a victory; the beaten general complained of the breach of etiquette;
so Wu-Pei-Fu went back to the position he held before the battle, and
fought all over again on a fine day. (It should be said that battles in
China are seldom bloody.) In such a country, militarism is not the
scourge it is with us; and the difference is due to the Confucian
ethics.[20]

Confucianism did not assume its present form until the twelfth century
A.D., when the personal God in whom Confucius had believed was thrust
aside by the philosopher Chu Fu Tze,[21] whose interpretation of
Confucianism has ever since been recognized as orthodox. Since the fall
of the Mongols (1370), the Government has uniformly favoured
Confucianism as the teaching of the State; before that, there were
struggles with Buddhism and Taoism, which were connected with magic, and
appealed to superstitious Emperors, quite a number of whom died of
drinking the Taoist elixir of life. The Mongol Emperors were Buddhists
of the Lama religion, which still prevails in Tibet and Mongolia; but
the Manchu Emperors, though also northern conquerors, were
ultra-orthodox Confucians. It has been customary in China, for many
centuries, for the literati to be pure Confucians, sceptical in religion
but not in morals, while the rest of the population believed and
practised all three religions simultaneously. The Chinese have not the
belief, which we owe to the Jews, that if one religion is true, all
others must be false. At the present day, however, there appears to be
very little in the way of religion in China, though the belief in magic
lingers on among the uneducated. At all times, even when there was
religion, its intensity was far less than in Europe. It is remarkable
that religious scepticism has not led, in China, to any corresponding