The lawless classes in China form a considerable percentage of the whole population. They are ruthless and cruel, and in the carrying out of their fell purposes they show but little consideration for the lives or property of those whom they may select to be their victims. There is a general impression in Western lands that the idolatrous races of people living in the East are a simple-minded folk, with but few passions and generous and tender-hearted to each other. They are supposed to lead a sunny life, and imitating the luxuriance of nature that the great sun continually spurs into action by his fiery heat, to have the widest sympathies with everything human. This is an ideal picture that could only have been drawn by the vivid forces of imagination. China is no Eden of this kind, and it may be accepted as a general truth that where men have lost the knowledge of God, and are not drawn into a noble life by an impression of His purity and tenderness which He wishes reproduced in the lives of the world, men's own conceptions of what a noble life ought to be will always fall far short of the Divine. The best days for China were in the ancient past, according to the sacred books of the nation, when God and Heaven were the prominent words in the religious life of the people, and when the idols had not yet come from India to lower the conceptions of the Divine. With the gradual disappearance of God, as a personal Power, from the thinking of the people there came the lower standard of morality that has its legitimate successor in the types we see in modern life. We are told that three centuries after Confucius wrote his lofty system of ethics, though even he began to give evidence that he was losing touch with a personal God that the illustrious sages whose writings he professed to be editing undoubtedly had, the nation had practically adopted the worship of nature, and made their offerings to the spirits of the mountains and of the streams that flowed through the land and brought fertility in their train. Morality, however, had in the meanwhile degenerated, and one has but to read the history of China[7] to see how the baser passions that influence men in the present day were very much in evidence in those primitive times. An incident in the life of one of the most famous Emperors that lived two centuries before Christ will confirm my statement on this head. Some time before his death he had a tomb built for himself that was constructed on a royal and a magnificent scale. It was really an underground palace and furnished in a style that suited the exalted ideas of the man who was designing it. It was furnished with every necessary for a luxurious life, and vast stores of gold and silver and precious jewels were deposited in strong rooms that no robber bands could break into.