sacrifice to their shades. The death-days of two generations of parents are kept sacred with solemn festival, and the nameless and unnumbered dead have their special days of ceremony and remembrance in the spring and autumn. Every house has its family shrine, every village its hall of ancestors. Thus the filial piety of the survivors honours those who have gone. As regards the living, respect is the great essential of daily intercourse. The subject respects his emperor, the son his father, the wife her husband, and the younger brother his elder brother. But respect is not only for those older than ourselves, or of superior station. The wisdom of Confucius is nowhere more clearly shown than in his utterance concerning the respect to be paid to youth: “A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present? If he reach the age of forty or fifty, and has not made himself heard of, then he will indeed not be worthy of respect.” _Maxima debetur pueris reverentia!_ The Chinese national spirit is a spirit of continuity; the spirit of the Confucian philosophy is a spirit of harmony with the environment of daily life. “Confucius,” says Tzŭ-ssŭ, “possessed, as if by hereditary transmission, the virtues of Yao and Shun [Emperors of the Golden Age], and modelled himself on Wên and Wu [first King of the Chou dynasty, 1133 B.C.] as his exemplars. Above all, he kept in unison with the seasons of the sky; below, he conformed to the water and the land. “We may liken him unto the sky and earth in respect of the universality with which they uphold and sustain things, the universality with which they overspread and enfold things. We may liken him unto the four seasons in respect of their varied march; unto the sun and moon in respect of their alternate shining. “All things are kept in train together without their injuring one another; their ways go on together without interfering one with another: the smaller forces in river streams, the greater forces in ample transformations. It is this that makes the sky and earth so great.”[1]