The situation is too involved, in view of the uncouthness of strange names and the absence of definite frontiers--changing as they did with the result of each few years' campaigning--to make it possible to give a full, or even approximately intelligible, explanation of each move. But the following main features are incontestable:--Ts'in, Tsin, Ts'i, and Ts'u were growing, progressive, and aggressive states, all of them strongly tinged with foreign blood, which foreign blood was naturally assimilated the more readily in proportion to the power, wealth, and culture of the assimilating orthodox nucleus. The imperial domain was an extinct political volcano, belching occasional fumes of threatening, sometimes noxious, but not ever fatally suffocating smoke, always without fire. "The Hia," that is, the federation of princes belonging to pure Hia, or (as we now say) "Chinese" stock, were evidently unwarlike in proportion to the absence of foreign blood in their veins; but they were all of them equally _rusés_, and all of them past-masters in casuistic diplomacy. Trade, agriculture, literature, and even law, were now quite active, and (as we shall gradually see in these short chapters) China was undoubtedly beginning to move, as, after 2500 years of a second "ritual" sleep, she is again now moving, at the beginning of the twentieth century A.D. CHAPTER XI RELIGION All through these five centuries of struggle, between the flight of the Emperor with the transfer of the metropolis in 771 B.C., and the total destruction of the feudal system by the First August Emperor of Ts'in in 221 B.C., it is of supreme interest to note that religion in our Western sense was not only non-existent throughout China, but had not yet even been conceived of as an abstract notion; apart, that is to say, from government, public law, family law, and class ritual. No word for "religion" was known to the language; the notion of Church or Temple served by a priestly caste had not entered men's minds. Offences against "the gods" or "the spirits," in a vague sense, were often spoken of; but, on the other hand, too much belief in their power was regarded as superstition. "Sin" was only conceivable in the sense of infraction of nature's general laws, as symbolized and specialized by imperial commands; direct, or delegated to vassal princes; in both cases as representatives, supreme or local, of Heaven, or of the Emperor Above, whose Son the dynastic central ruler for the time being was figuratively supposed to be. No vassal prince ever presumed to style himself "Son of Heaven," though nearly all the barbarous vassals called themselves "King" (the only other title the Chou monarchs took) in their own dominions. "In the Heaven there can only be one Sun; on Earth there can only be one Emperor"; this was the maxim, and, ever since the Chou conquest in 1122 B.C., the word "King" had done duty for the more ancient "Emperor," which, in remote times had