“May the Golden Round be kept intact; May Heaven help us; Let the people and Nature live as quietly as ducks among lilies; Both peoples (Chinese and Manchu) now dress alike; therefore be alike; In this time of the Manchu (Ta Ching--Great Pure) dynasty we are fortunate to see true splendor and greatness; May Heaven protect the Emperor and his line; For Heaven is greatest, And Nature is infinite” (the suggestion being to fear God, or Nature’s god). The omnivorous Goethe made some investigation of Chinese literature, and here is his opinion of what he had read: “The people think, act and feel almost entirely as we do, although with them everything is clearer, calmer and more moral. In their arrangements everything is sensible, bourgeois, without great passion or poetry. What is moral, proper and in strict moderation is considered.” Now and then more or less distinct evidences of Chinese influence on the Greeks come to view, though the thread west of the headwaters of the Tarim is now lost. Many of the doctrines of Pythagoras and Plato are similar to those of Chinese Lao Tse, and therefore they may have been instructed by the Chinese sage, whose book could have gone overland to Greece with the caravans of silk. The advent of the many newspapers has made a great difference in the nerves and consciousness of the Chinese. From being the most stolid of peoples, indifferent to famine, flood, war, persecution by the officials or by the favored, poverty, pain, hardships physical and mental, they have become as restive, impatient, nervous and self-conscious as other races. Famine and flood used to sweep down and destroy millions. What was the use of complaining, since no one knew, nobody cared, and the victim might as well not care? Now, if disaster takes off not a million men, but one man, it is important, the newspapers chronicle it, and show how the lot of others may be the lot of the individual. The sufferer himself cries: “Woe is to me; isn’t this unendurable; help me; I can not, I WILL not bear it.” The newspaper has developed the ego. The Chinese has become self-conscious and nervous. He can not, he will not hereafter bear anything more than other peoples. In the August, 1911, floods and the October, 1911, revolution more fuss was made over the loss of a thousand men and women than over the loss of hundreds of thousands in the Taiping rebellion in the same region in 1853.