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SURGEON-GENERAL C. A. GORDON, M.D., C.B., Q.H.P., ETC., 



that is, those "svlio believe in a hereafter. Their charity is no 

 little of it, a loan to fortune. And as regards the action of the 

 government, I think there is a good deal of political motive in it. 

 When the government comes to the rescue in famine, for instance, 

 a strong motive, vrithout doubt, is that without keeping the people 

 quiet they are in danger of most serious consequences. It Avonld 

 not be fair, at the same time, to either Confucianism or Buddhism 

 to affirm that neither the official nor the private citizen is at all 

 moved by the teaching of these systems to be charitable. 



I am afraid that, perhaps, I am encroaching on your time, but 

 there is a great deal of ground to travel over. 



To come to the laws of China, the codification of these is stated 

 to have begun about B.C. 1100. Certainly the laws of the 

 Chou Dynasty, which was founded about that date, are the oldest 

 Chinese laws we possess ; but we should never approach any part 

 of Chinese ancient literature without remembering that the burn- 

 ing of the books two centuries before Christ by the decree of the 

 despot who, having extinguished all his rival vassals, created him- 

 self the first empei^or of all China, has put in doubt the 

 authenticity of many of the extant texts. The dynasty of 

 this man lasted so short a time, not more than twenty years, and 

 the territory he had already assumed command of, was so extensive, 

 that I should doubt that all the literature he intended to destroy 

 had been destroyed. Still, he certainly went to work very ruth- 

 lessly, and to his command that all the books except two or three 

 should be so disposed of, some effect was given. His dynasty was 

 no sooner at an end than there was a reaction, and a number of 

 books were, according to tradition, recovered. At all events within 

 half a century of his disappearance, China had re-established her 

 claim to possess a literature, and it is on that literature that her 

 people have been fed ever since. Though it is manifest when parts 

 of these ancient books are compared with each other that they 

 cannot all be accepted as authentic, I see no reason to doubt that 

 books very much such as those believed to have existed before and 

 after the time of Confucius (b.c. 550-470), did exist, and that they 

 were very much the same as those we have now. Thus the Ritual 

 of Chou or some book of the sort was, I can have little doubt, the 



