Illustrations of this abound everywhere. Take the farmer, for example. He has been accustomed to plough his fields with an old-fashioned implement that was devised ages before the Christian era. It is of the exact pattern that it was when it issued from the brain of the man who is credited with having thought it out. Through countless ages it has done the work of the Empire, but time has left it absolutely untouched, and if the inventor could come to life to-day he would see that the old clumsy thing that he had hastily thought out when the fathers of the race, tired of their wanderings, settled down on the banks of the mighty river that met them as they wandered eastwards, had never changed with the advancing fortunes of their children, but was identical in every detail with the one with which they began their first ploughing in the far-off misty ages of the past. You talk to a Chinese farmer about the wonderful ploughs of the West, and how sometimes they were driven by steam, and in a few hours acres of land would be ready for the harrow. His eyes flash, for he is a farmer to the very tips of his fingers, and he thinks of the days of toil that it takes him to accomplish the very same thing, and for the moment he would like to have some of those ploughs to upturn the hard and rugged soil that his own antiquated implement seems so helpless to break through. He has a vision for a moment of how the monotony and drudgery of labour might be exchanged for a time of comparative rest, when nature in response to a new impulse should yield the fruits of the soil with a more generous hand. But the vision quickly dies out of his imagination, and the old conservative instinct flashes once more through his brain, and so the old plough and the hoe that have done the work of the centuries are more firmly fixed in his imagination than ever they were before. [Illustration: PLOUGHING WITH A WATER BUFFALO. _To face p. 124._] One of the great results of the intense tenacity of purpose that characterizes the Chinese is to repress original thought. From their very loyalty to the discoveries and inventions of past ages, they have become merely imitators, and any one who should dare to deviate from well-established lines on any subject would be looked upon as a man dangerous to the well-being of the Empire. It may be confidently asserted that for a thousand years no new thought or original ideas that have quickened the pulse in this old country have been propounded by any one of its vast or varied population. Whilst the West has been seething with excitement and new continents have been discovered and society has been upheaved by vast discoveries, this great nation has been going on in its easy-going, sleepy way, content with the half-dozen or so of meagre ideas with which it started its career ages ago.