Now was the time to prove his theories, and show whether he was the Man to the core, that he had been so assiduously showing himself, you may say, on the rind. Ah ha! now surely, with hard work before him, this scholar, theorist, conventional formalist, ritualist, and what else you may like to call him, will be put to shame,--shown up empty and foolish before the hard-headed men of action of his age. Who, indeed,--the hard-headed men of action-- have succeeded in doing precisely nothing but to make confusion worse confounded; how much less, then, will this Impractical One do! Let us watch him, and have our laugh...--On the wrong side of your faces then; for lo now, miracles are happening! He takes control; and here at last is one city in great Chu Hia where crime has ceased to be. How does he manage it? The miracle looks but the more miraculous as you watch. He frames rules for everything; insists on the proprieties; morning, noon, and night holds up an example, and, says he, relies on the power of that.--Example? Tush, he must be beheading right and left!--Nothing of the sort; he is all against capital punishment, and will have none of it. But there is the fact: you can leave your full purse in the streets of Chung-tu, and pick it up unrifled when you pass next; you can pay your just price, and get your just measure for it, fearing no cheateries; High Cost of Living is gone; corners in this and that are no more; graft is a thing you must go elsewhere to look for;--there is none of it in Chung-tu. And graft, let me say, was a thing as proper to the towns of China then, as to the graftiest modern city you might mention. The thing is inexplicable--but perfectly attested. Not quite inexplicable, either: he came from the Gods, and had the Gloves of Gwron on his hands: he had the wisdom you cannot fathom, which meets all events and problems as they come, and finds their solution in its superhuman self, where the human brain-mind finds only dense impenetrability.--Marquis Ting saw and wondered.--"Could you do this for the whole state?" he asked.--"Surely; and for the whole empire," said Confucius. The Marquis made him, first Assistant-Superintendent of Works, then Minister of Crime.