will explain the abnormally early development of the Chinese race,
and its subsequent career of inactivity. Meanwhile the youthful
nurse, in blissful ignorance of the evidence which her present
precocity affords against her future possibilities, pursues her
sports with intermittent attention to her charge, whose poor little
head lolls about, now on one side and now on the other, in a most
distressingly loose manner, an uninterested spectator of the
proceedings.

As soon as the babe gets a trifle bigger he ceases to be ministered
to and begins his long course of ministering to others. His home
life consists of attentive subordination. The relation his
obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps
sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on
the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor
thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same
injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.
To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to
the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he
is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his
only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping
from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of
domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be remembered, was
for his father, his next for his son, and his last for his wife.
He lost his wife, it may be noted in passing. Filial piety is the
greatest of Chinese virtues. Indeed, an undutiful son is a
monstrosity, a case of moral deformity. It could now hardly be
otherwise. For a father sums up in propria persona a whole pedigree
of patriarchs whose superimposed weight of authority is practically
divine. This condition of servitude is never outgrown by the