en. xxi.] GENESIS OF MAN, INTELLECTUALLY. 305 



most brilliant feats in missionary annals. Such unparalleled 

 ascendency did the priests acquire over the imaginations 

 of these barbarians that they actually made them cease 

 from warfare. They taught them European methods of 

 agriculture, as well as the arts of house-building, painting, 

 dyeing, furniture-making, even the use of watches ; and they 

 administered the affairs of the community with a despotic 

 power which has seldom been equalled either in absoluteness 

 or in beneficence. Nevertheless the superficiality of all this 

 show of civilization was illustrated by the fact that, unless 

 perpetually watched, the workmen would go home leaving 

 their oxen yoked to the plough, or would even cut them up 

 for supper if no other meat happened to be at hand. 

 Examples of a state of things intermediate between this 

 barbaric improvidence and the care-taking foresight of the 

 European are to be found among the Chinese, a people 

 who have risen far above barbarism, but whose civilization 

 is still of a primitive type. The illustration u rendered 

 peculiarly forcible by the fact that the Chinese are a very 

 industrious people, and where the returns for labour are 

 immediate will work as steadily as Germans or Americans. 

 Owing to their crowded population, every rood of ground is 

 needed for cultivation, and upon their great rivers the 

 traveller continually meets with little floating farms con 

 structed upon rafts and held in place by anchors. Yet side 

 by side with these elaborate but fragile structures are to be 

 seen acres of^swamp-land which only need a few years of 

 careful draining to become permanently fit for tillage. So 

 incapable are the Chinese of adapting their actions to 

 sequences at all remote, that they continue, age after age, 

 to resort to such temporary devices, rather than to bestow 

 their labour where its fruits, however enduring, cannot be 

 enjoyed from the outset. 1 The contrast proves that the 

 cause is the intellectual inability to realize vividly a group of 



1 See Mill, Political Economy, book i. cliap ti. 

 VOL. II. X 



