for several generations; but there was some thing behind it which shows that love for humanity was not the leading motive of the chief parties. Two years later it was that the philosophical brother of the King of Wu went his rounds among the Chinese princes, and it is evident that Ts'u only desired peace with North China whilst she tackled this formidable new enemy on the coast. Tsin, on the other hand, was in trouble with the "six great families" (the survivors of the "eleven great families" conciliated by the Second Protector), who were gradually undermining the princely authority in Tsin to their own private aggrandisement. In 572 B.C., when the legitimate ruler of Tsin, who had been superseded by irregular successors, was fetched back from the Emperor's court, to which he had gone for a quiet asylum, he drew up a treaty of conditions with his own ministers, and immolated a chicken as sanction; this idea is still occasionally perpetuated in British courts of justice, where Chinese, probably without knowing it, draw upon ancient history when asked by the court how they are accustomed to sanction an oath; cocks are often also carried about by modern Chinese boatmen for purposes of sacrifice. In the year 504, after Wu had captured the Ts'u capital, one of the petty orthodox Chinese states taken by Ts'u-- the first to be so taken by barbarians--in 684, but left by Ts'u internally independent, declined to render any assistance to Wu, unless she could prove her competence to hold permanently the Ts'u territory thus conquered. The King of Ts'u was so grateful for this that he drew some blood from the breast of his own half- brother, and on the spot made a treaty with the vassal prince. It 662, even in a love vow, the ruler of Lu cut his own arm and exchanged drops of blood with his lady-love. In 481 the people of Wei (the small orthodox state on the middle Yellow River between Tsin and Lu) forced one of their politicians to swear allegiance to the desired successor under the sanction of a sacrificial pig.