It is rather remarkable that the invention of the "greater seal" character in 827 B.C. practically coincides with the first signs of imperial decadence; this is only another piece of evidence in favour of the proposition that enlightenment and patriarchal rule could not exist comfortably together. When Ts'in conquered the whole of modern China 600 years later, unified weights and measures, the breadth of axles, and written script, and remedied other irregularities that had hitherto prevailed in the rival states, it is evident that the need of a more intelligible script was then found quite as urgent as the need of roads suitable for all carts, and of measures by which those carts could bring definite quantities of metal and grain tribute to the capital. Accordingly the First August Emperor's prime minister did at once set to work to invent the "lesser seal" character, in which (so late as A.D. 200) the first Chinese dictionary was written; this "lesser seal" is still fairly readable after a little practice, but for daily use it has long been and is impracticable and obsolete. If we reflect how difficult it is for us to decipher the old engrossed charters and written letters of the English kings, we may all the more easily imagine how even a slight change in the form of "letters," or strokes, will make easy reading of Chinese impossible. It is a mistake to suppose that the Chinese have to "spell their way" laboriously through the written character so familiar to them: it is just as easy to "skim over" a Chinese newspaper in a few minutes as it is to "take in" the leading features of the _Times_ in the same limited time; and volumes of Chinese history or literature in general can be "gutted" quite easily, owing to the facility with which the so-called pictographs, once familiar, lend themselves to "skipping." The Bamboo Books, dug up in A.D. 281, the copies of the classics concealed in the walls of Confucius' house, the copy of Lao-tsz's philosophical work recorded to have been in the possession of a Chinese empress in 150 B.C.--all these were written in the "greater seal," and the painstaking industry of Chinese specialists was already necessary when the Christian era began, in order to reduce the ancient characters to more modern forms. Since then the written character has been much clarified and simplified, and it is just as easy to express sentiments in written Chinese as in any other language; but, of course, when totally new ideas are introduced, totally new characters must be invented; and inventions, both of individual characters and of expressions, are going on now. CHAPTER XVIII TREATIES AND VOWS