“No,” replied Le. “He was standing alone once when I was passing through the court below with hasty steps, and said to me: “‘Have you read the Odes?’ “On my replying, ‘Not yet,’ he added: “‘If you do not learn the Odes, you will not be fit to converse with.’ “Another day in the same way and the same place, he said to me: “‘Have you read the rules of Propriety?’ “On my replying ‘Not yet,’ he added: “‘If you do not learn the rules of Propriety, your character cannot be established.’” “I asked one thing,” said the enthusiastic disciple, “and I have learned three things. I have learned about the Odes, I have learned about the rules of Propriety, and I have learned that the Superior Man maintains a distant reserve toward his son.” In this anecdote—and in his works—it is evident that Confucius had the Chinese estimate of the child—the father was sovereign; the child, as long as that sovereign lived, a mere subject. It was this idea and the strongly implanted idea of filial piety that led to the callous attitude toward children among the disciples of Confucius. The Chinese explanation and defence of this phase of their life is that up to the year 232 B. C. there did not exist in China anything but the most humane system of treatment of children. The Jesuit authors of the _Mémoires_ declare that up to that time there is no trace of the drowning of infants, their abandonment, etc. Instead of being a burden, says the missionary chronicler, children were considered an asset and the orphan was generally in the position of having to choose between many would-be adoptive parents. The law is cited to prove this, the Code declaring that in case there were several people anxious to adopt an orphan, preference should be given to those who were childless.[80] It was under Ts’in Chi Hoang,[81] who reigned about 232 B. C., that the abominable practice grew up, along with many other ills. The greed and avarice of the nobles and the Emperor’s immediate following produced much suffering, in the wake of which came famine, causing mothers and fathers to abandon children that they were not able to feed. Whatever truth there may be in this statement, there is very little doubt that the reign of Ts’in Chi Hoang was one of bloodshed, war, and suffering and that with the end of the Chou (or Chow), dynasty, and the accession of the Prince Ts’in, first as the dominating King and then as Emperor of China, there was much suffering. “It was a time of extreme severity,” says the historian Tsse Ma Thsien, “and all affairs were decided according to the law without either grace or charity.”[82]