No one can consider China in any way a model social organism; but its duration is marvellous and unequalled in the history of the race. The absence of hereditary privilege and of chattelhood as social or religious institutions, accounts, among other reasons, for this unique phenomenon. With all its drawbacks and defects, this long-lived civilization, with its schools, its general intelligence, its thousands-of-years old routine, compares, in many respects, favorably with that in the Southern States calling itself Christian, which, having partly inherited the great European development, and receiving influences from the free sections of the Union, has, nevertheless, for the last thirty or forty years, turned on its own crooked tracks, and, now prohibits, under severe penalty, schools for the children of its field laborers, whom it keeps in bondage. It sighs also for a further extension of oligarchic privileges, and for the enslavement of all human labor: re-enslaves the free or expels them; legalizes and sanctifies the sum of all social villanies: whose last word is the Lynch law, and the reckless, lawless persecution of free speech and even of free thought; while assassination becomes more and more frequent. In the most ancient Asiatic world, the primitive societies generally had analogous beginnings, whatever may have been the regions and climates cradling them, whatever the difference of time, epochs, or race-characteristics. Analogous events and conditions evoked similar developments in the primitive men. The manifestations of man's intellectual and physical activity were everywhere spontaneous: a transmission of the various rudiments of civilization cannot logically be admitted.