generally his, served to stamp the idea all the more indelibly upon
the national consciousness.

In this manner the family from a natural relation grew into a highly
unnatural social anachronism. The loose ties of a roving life
became fetters of a fixed conventionality. Bonds originally of
mutual advantage hardened into restrictions by which the young were
hopelessly tethered to the old. Midway in its course the race
undertook to turn round and face backwards, as it journeyed on.
Its subsequent advance could be nothing but slow.

The head of a family is so now in something of a corporeal sense.
From him emanate all its actions; to him are responsible all its parts.
Any other member of it is as incapable of individual expression as
is the hand, or the foot, or the eye of man. Indeed, Confucian
doctors of divinity might appropriately administer psychically to
the egoistic the rebuke of the Western physician to the too
self-analytic youth who, finding that, after eating, his digestion
failed to give him what he considered its proper sensations, had
come to consult the doctor as to how it ought to feel. "Feel! young
man," he was answered, "you ought not to be aware that you have a
digestion." So with them, a normally constituted son knows not what
it is to possess a spontaneity of his own. Indeed, this very word
"own," which so long ago in our own tongue took to itself the symbol
of possession, well exemplifies his dependent state. China furnishes
the most conspicuous instance of the want of individual rights.
A Chinese son cannot properly be said to own anything. The title to
the land he tills is vested absolutely in the family, of which he is
an undivided thirtieth, or what-not. Even the administration of the
property is not his, but resides in the family, represented by its