Like the maxim of filial piety, the Confucian teaching which makes virtue and not material prosperity the aim and end of government has been a conservative force in Chinese life and society. “It would be hard to overestimate,” says Dr. Martin, “the influence which has been exerted by this little schedule of political ethics [the Great Study], occupying, as it has, so prominent a place in the Chinese mind for four and twenty centuries, teaching the people to regard the Empire as a vast family, and the Emperor to rule by moral influence, making the goal of his ambition not the wealth but the virtue of his subjects. It is certain that the doctrines which it embodies have been largely efficient in rendering China what she is, the most ancient and the most populous of existing nations.”[184] In still another way has the moral ideal reacted favorably upon Chinese civilization. We have noted the high place in the standard of excellence assigned by the Chinese sages to the duty of intellectual self-culture. It is scarcely to be doubted that this emphasis laid upon learning as an important factor in the formation of moral character has greatly fostered learning and has been a chief agency in the creation of the Chinese educational system with its competitive literary examinations, which from the earliest times down almost to the present day formed the sole gateway to public office. [Sidenote: Unfavorable effects of the ideal] But Confucius, while inculcating the duty of seeking wisdom, taught his people to look for it in the past. He enjoined them to seek the moral ideal in the life and deeds of the ancients. Never in the moral history of the world has the inculcation of a specific duty had a profounder influence upon the destinies of a people than this requirement of conformity to the ways of the fathers has had upon the destinies of the Chinese race. It has been one of the chief causes of the unchanging, stereotyped character of Chinese civilization. In obedience to the requirements of this ideal of goodness the Chinese for two millenniums and more have made to-day like yesterday. Hence the cycling, goalless movement of Chinese history. Just as the undue emphasis laid by the Chinese moralists upon the duty of conforming to the ways of the ancients has reacted in some respects unfavorably upon Chinese life, so has the exaggerated stress laid by them upon the doctrine of the just medium exerted a similar unfavorable influence. This has tended to produce a dull uniformity in Chinese life and thought. The lack of lofty ideal aims has caused Chinese history to be singularly barren in chivalric and heroic elements. The everlasting round of routine makes life a treadmill. It is “the prose of existence.”