Again, many of these characters are so similar in form that to write them accurately requires intense concentration, and acute powers of memory. Notwithstanding this, China has been a center of culture and intellectual activity from her first appearance upon the stage of history. From the earliest period, the social and political system of the Chinese has been based upon educational qualifications. All political dignities, honors and preferments, by unalterable law and usage depend upon the educated abilities and scholarship of candidates for office. The rank of mandarin comes by no hereditary right, nor by favor of a sovereign, but through severe intellectual effort. If in some cases this is obtained through corruption and bribery of some clever scholar who sells his literary privileges to some richer competitor, this does not alter the case; honors still go to scholarship. It is said of these successful men, the true students, that it would be difficult to parallel them in any country for readiness with the pen and retentive memory. If they are not highly educated, it is due to their false system of educational merit, which consists in an undue exercise of the memory at the expense of the thinking powers. It is also due to the fact that it is a stereotyped system, based upon an ancient usage and custom, concerned with the past and ancient tradition rather than present or future progress. The early history of this people is specially interesting in the light of recent discoveries. These suggest, and the suggestions are confirmed in the ancient literature of the Chinese, that at a period about B. C. 2500, these people made their first appearance in China from some locality south of the Caspian Sea, in western Asia. This is supposed, from certain historical correspondences, to have been Susiana, and that their emigration was the result of political disturbances occurring throughout western Asia at that date. That, driven from their early home, they wandered eastward, finally settling in the fertile districts of Shansi and Honan, near the Yellow river. About the same time, other families of this people settled to the south in Annim, from whence these kindred people finally spread over all China. When they first came into the country, they found there aboriginal tribes of various races. In their historical annals the most important of these primitive inhabitants are referred to as the “Kwei people.” It is said of these that they practiced the art of writing and possessed a literature which is referred to by the Chinese as the “Kwei Books,” which included a treatise on music. M. de Lacouperie conjectures these primitive people to be of the Aryan stock, of whom remnants are to be found at the present day in Cambodia. When the Chinese came into the land they had a culture of their own. They were advanced in the industrial arts and they possessed a system of writing and a literature.