f 
See Se a. Se 
The crystallized Culture of China. 5 
age this progress was stopped, and since then they have neither 
advanced nor retrograded. The Chinese invented gunpowder, 
the mariners’ compass, and the printing-press. They made silk 
goods and ceramics long before they were known to the western 
world; but they used gunpowder only for fire-works, and even 
with the compass they never ventured so far from the land as 
the Phenecians without it. They had the printing-press long 
before Europe, but their literature is greatly inferior to that of 
the Greeks and Romans, who used only the papyrus and skins 
or parchment for their writings. Their fields of bituminous and 
anthracite coal are unsurpassed in extent, but though coal -has 
been used for ages in their houses, it has never to any consider- 
able extent been used for other purposes. Their form of govern- 
ment, the patriarchal, which contributed to stay development, 
is founded on the conception of the state as an enlarged family, 
and of the family as the state in miniature. As the father pos- 
sesses absolute control over his own family, so the emperor 
possesses despotic power over the lives and property of all the 
families. The Chinese have neither freedom of mind nor liberty 
of body. They are an impersonal people with little conscious 
individuality. Their civilization, begun so early, has remained 
stationary for thousands of years. 
Arabia. 
From China we pass to another country no less peculiar in its 
physical features, but entirely dissimilar. In a territory nearly 
two-thirds surrounded by water we should not expect to find 
one of the arid tracts of the world, where rain falls only once 
in three or four years; ina country on a parallel of latitude only 
a little south of Florida, with a mean altitude of 3,000 feet, we do 
not expect to find the zone of maximum heat, and still less do 
we expect to find ice and snow for three months of the year on 
mountains only 7,000 to 8,000 feet in height. All of these con- 
trasts are found in Arabia. A range of mountains follows the 
coast line around the whole of Arabia, and except on Red sea 
and ona few small streams and oases Arabia is dry, hot and 
barren, the land of the shepherd. The largest cities are Mecca 
and Medina, near Red sea, to which annually thousands of pil- 
grims resort; for it is a sacred obligation on every Mohammedan 
to yisit Mecca before he dies, Arabia has been peopled from 
