A nation possibly as old as the Babylonian or Egyptian was the Chinese; but of their history, less is known. It is well established, however, that they possessed a system of picture writing in which each word was represented by a symbol. The system was much more cumbrous, of course, than the syllabic or alphabetical; but its invention was a performance, nevertheless, of the utmost brilliancy and importance, viewed from the light of what the world was then. There is little doubt also that the Chinese were the original inventors of the magnetic compass and of printing from blocks, two of those essential inventions, without which civilization could not have been brought about. Another of China's inventions was gunpowder; though it is not clear that the Chinese ever used it to propel projectiles out of guns. Achievements equally great, and maybe greater, were the creations of religions--Confucianism and Taoism, invented in China, and Buddhism, invented in India. These religions may seem to us very crude and commonplace and earthy; but we should not shut our eyes to the fact that they have probably influenced a greater number of human beings toward right living than any other three religions that we know of. Like Babylonia and Egypt, China became conservative as she grew older. At the present day, her name stands almost as the symbol of everything non-progressive and non-inventive. Assyria was able to capture Babylon about the year 1250 B. C., and to maintain the position of the dominant power in western Asia for about 600 years. A progressive and ambitious people, they accomplished an original and important step in the art of government by organizing conquered peoples into provinces under governors appointed by the king. It does not seem to be a great straining of the word to declare that this achievement was so novel, so concrete and so useful as to possess the essential features of an invention. For if we realize that during all the times that had gone by, conquered peoples had remained simply conquered peoples, paying tribute but not forming parts of the conquering state, we can see that the idea of actually incorporating them into the state, thereby increasing the population of the state by the number of people incorporated, and making the state stronger in that proportion, we can hardly fail to realize that the conception of doing this was of the highest order of brilliancy. To work out afterwards the details of developing the conception in such a way as to render possible the production of an actual and workable machine of government was a constructive act. When the machine was actually produced a new thing had been created. In other words, the institution of this new scheme in government seems to have followed the same three stages as the invention of a mechanical device; that is, conception, development and production. _The likeness between this process and that of conception, gestation and birth is obvious._