Before the Chou rulers lost their power and became the faraway analogues of the late Holy Roman emperors or the Tennos of shogunal Japan, there emerged from their house one of the most remarkable of all Chinese political leaders. The Duke of Chou, who lived in the eleventh century B. C., seems to have done most in founding the system which later ages called _Confucian_--after Confucius had reformed it, clarified it, and given it ethical stature. He is also regarded as the father of the Constitution of Chou, a plan for a bureaucratic monarchy with an emperor, three Great Dukes, and six ministers (in charge of administrative, educational and economic, religious and historiographic, military, judicial, and engineering matters, respectively) ruling over nine large provinces.[3] The Duke of Chou is finally credited with the authorship of several important treatises. He has served as the archetype of intellectual statesmanship in Chinese legend. His work may have contributed in great part to the long life of the Chou dynasty, as a _de jure_ ruling house, since a family which had produced such an eminent member was not to be set aside lightly. In the earlier part of this period the feudal order seems to have ensured relative stability, but in the later part a system of states arose. The greatest Chinese philosophers, Confucius (Kung Fu-tz[)u]) and Lao Tz[)u], lived in interstate turmoil. They saw all about them the displacement of virtues which had long been recognized, the advance of states which substituted greed for morality, the centralization of power, the destruction of the feudal economy, the transformation of ceremonial warfare into outright slaughter, and the rising disrespect of the advancing kings for the Chou overlord. Lao Tz[)u] preached a philosophy devoid of constructive politics; he had little use for the state and for the organization of society. Not quite an anarchist, his programs are probably closer to those of Herbert Spencer than of any other Western thinker. But the spiritual and psychological background from which he wrote is roughly identical with that of the world's great mystical intuitionists. Confucius (551-479 B. C.) preached a system of ethics and education which was to rationalize and systematize preceding Chinese thought and lead to the system of ideological control known as Confucian.