no more title to be mentioned in history than any other servant or "harmless drudge." That his doctrines were well known is not wonderful, for Tsz-ch'an, his contemporary, and this great man's colleagues of the other states, also had doctrines of their own which were widely discussed and, as we have seen, even Tsz-ch'an was severely blamed for the unheard-of novelty of committing the laws to writing, both by Confucius of Lu and by Shuh Hiang of Tsin (imperial clan states). It is reasonable to suppose, therefore, that the traditional story is true; namely, that Lao-tsz's doctrines were never taught in a school at all, and that he had no followers or admirers except the vassal envoys who used to come on spiritual business to the metropolis. We have seen how these men used to entertain each other over their wine by quoting the Odes and other ancient saws; when consulting the imperial library to rectify their own dates, they would naturally meet the old recluse Lao-tsz, and hear from his own mouth what he thought of the coming collapse anticipated by all. He is said to have left orthodox China in disgust, and gone West--well, he must have passed through Ts'in if he went to the west. At the frontier pass (it is not known precisely whether on the imperial frontier or on the Ts'in frontier) an acquaintance or correspondent on duty there invited him to put his thoughts into writing, which he did. Books being extremely rare, copies would be slowly transmitted. This was about 500 B.C., between which time and 200 B.C., when a copy of his book is first reported to be actually held in the hand by a definite person, the great protecting powers, and later the seven kings, were all engaged in a bloodthirsty warfare, which ended in the almost total destruction throughout the empire of the Odes, Rites, and the Book in 213 B.C. Remember, however, that the literary empire practically meant parts of the modern provinces of Ho Nan and Shan Tung. The "Changes" were not destroyed; and as the First August Emperor himself, his illegitimate father, several of his statesmen, and his visitors the travelling diplomats, were all either Taoists or imbued with Taoist doctrines (their sole policy being to destroy the old ritual and feudal thrones), there is ground to conjecture that Lao-tsz's book escaped too, and was deliberately suffered to escape. We know absolutely nothing of that; assuming the truth of the tradition that there was a book, we do not know what became of the first copy, nor how many copies were made of it during the succeeding 300 years. No attempt whatever has ever been made by the serious Chinese historians themselves to manufacture a story. It is, of course, unsatisfactory not to know all the exact truth; but, for the matter of that, the existence, identity, and authorship of Confucius' pupil and commentator Tso K'iu-ming, the official historian of Lu, is equally obscure; not to mention the history of the earliest Taoist critics who actually mention