[80] The family-system has of course existed in regions other than Asia. "In most of the Greek states and in Rome," says Sir Henry Maine (_Ancient Law_, 4th ed., p. 128), "there long remained the vestiges of an ascending series of groups out of which the State was at first constituted.... The elementary group is the Family, connected by common subjection to the highest male ascendant. The aggregation of Families forms the Gens or House. The aggregation of Houses makes the Tribe. The aggregation of Tribes constitutes the commonwealth." In another place (p. 126) he speaks of "the clearest indications that society in primitive times was not what it is assumed to be at present, a collection of _individuals_. In fact, and in the view of the men who composed it, it was _an aggregation of families_. The contrast may be most forcibly expressed by saying that the _unit_ of an ancient society was the Family, of a modern society the individual." Had Maine been acquainted with the details of the social organisation of the Chinese he would have found a copious source from which to draw illustrations of his thesis, and would have perceived that the family-unit system is not yet to be spoken of as a vanished phase of social development. [81] "The whole Chinese administrative system is based on the doctrine of filial piety, in its most extended signification of duty to natural parents and also to political parents, as the Emperor's magistrates are to this day familiarly called. China is thus one vast republic of innumerable private families, or petty _imperia_, within one public family, or general _imperium_; the organisation consists of a number of self-producing and ever-multiplying independent cells, each maintaining a complete administrative existence apart from the central power. Doubtless, it is this fact which in a large measure accounts for China's indestructibility in the face of so many conquests and revolutions."--PROF. E. H. PARKER in the _Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (China Branch)_, vol. xl. (1909), p. 14. [82] It must be understood that what is referred to is "custom" rather than law, and that these remarks are not always applicable to the business relations between Chinese and foreigners at the treaty-ports, where commercial intercourse is to a great extent conducted on Western lines. When an English banker declares (as he has declared) that the word of a Chinese is as good as his bond, he is paying a compliment not so much to the character of the Chinese people (who as individuals are no more though perhaps no less trustworthy than average Englishmen), as to the fundamental soundness of the Chinese social system. If that system is subverted, through the efforts either of foreign advisers or of Chinese reformers, the moral results may be disastrous beyond conception. Let there be evolution by all means; not revolution. [83] As, for instance, after the silk worms have been taken off the scrub-oak bushes.