A RETROSPECT AND A’FORECAST. 19 
And he reminds the advocates of the “primitive” theory that “the Chinese nation, like 
the Egyptians and Babylonians, had been raised to a highly artificial civilization before the 
Pheenicians and Greeks came out of barbarism.” It is, moreover, the tendency of all lan- 
guages, in the course of time, to drop inflections, and the total lack of them in Chinese may 
simply be the result of exceedingly great antiquity. 
The monosyllabic language of China has been spoken by some persons whom the 
verdict of mankind has pronounced worthy of veneration. If we estimate their rank in 
the hierarchy of benefactors of their race, by the number of those on whose lives they 
have exercised a shaping and controlling influence, no Western sages can be compared 
with Confucius and Mencius. Nor are there any moral precepts, save those for which a 
higher than human origin is claimed, more adapted to make men wise and loving and 
happy than those of the Four Books, which bear the name of the great Chinese teachers. 
(See Pauthier’s “ Confucius et Mencius,” passim). Oftheir pure and lofty morality, says M. 
Pauthier, we may well be proud, whatever be our progress in civilization. As to the literary 
value of the Chinese language, Dr. Farrar thinks that it has“ far more right to stand on a line 
with Sanscrit than Hungarian, or even than Finnish, and far more right than Egyptian 
has to stand on a line with Hebrew.” According to Archbishop Trench, the worth of a 
language and those who speak it has no better test than their proverbs and the Chinese 
language abounds in this species of condensed wisdom. As to Chinese poetry, Mr. Giles 
(than whom there is no better authority on the subject) writes as follows: “ I am acquainted 
with nothing which could be taken as a better specimen of the highest flights of Chinese 
inspiration than that beautiful poem, Tennyson’s “Dream of Fair Women.” Can it be said 
that such a language, whose productions are models for the literary classes of half the 
world, a language which for over two millenniums has been the mother speech of states- 
men, poets, orators, inventors, warriors, merchants, manufacturers, and whose fame though it 
may not have reached as far west as the “Isles of the Gentiles,” is a household word to 
500,000,000 of men, can have had an insignificant share in the enlightenment of the world ? 
To those who spoke it, even, we owe some of our most important inventions, arts and in- 
dustries, some of them the very mainspring of modern progress. Explorers have been 
busy during the last century among the ruins of Babylon, of the Nile lands, of Asia Minor, 
of Greece, of Italy, of the vanished races of our own continent. If China, too, were only 
known by its remains, archeologists would, probably, be equally interested in it. But, 
having survived every empire of both hemispheres, it lacks the charm we attach to what is 
dead. “ He whowould realize by analogy,” says that wonderful genius of strange experiences, 
W. G. Palgrave, “what Egypt was in her earlier better days, before Hyksos or Persian, 
Greek or Roman, Arab or Turk, had dwarfed her down to their own lesser stature, let him 
visit Canton.* * * There he may study the results of a government based on reverence, on 
guarded rank, on respected age ; of a priesthood kept within its proper limits of ceremonial 
observance and rational rites, * * * of administrative wisdom wisely limiting itself to the 
good order, sufficiency and happiness of man’s actual life.* * * Doubtless, there is much 
that China might advantageously learn from Europe ; but Europe, too, unquiet, disintegrat- 
ing Europe, might, with, at least equal advantage, take more than one lesson from Cathay.” 
Whatever may be said to the contrary, moreover, the power of China is by no means on the 
wane, and the re-conquest of Kuldja, the annexation of the Panthays, the awe with which 
the sovereigns of Pekin are regarded even in Nepaul, show that neither is the past forgot- 
