Even to-day uniform treatment of these grand life-courses is immensely difficult, because the more remote fields have not been seriously worked up at all. Once more, it is the lordly outlook of the West European--he will only notice that which approaches him from one or another antiquity by the proper and respectful route of a Middle Age, and that which goes its own ways will get but little of his attention. Thus, of the things of the Chinese and the Indian worlds, certain kinds are now beginning to be tackled--art, religion, philosophy--but the political history is dealt with, if at all, “chattily.” It does not occur to anyone to treat the great constitutional problems of Chinese history--the Hohenstaufen-destiny of the Li-Wang (842), the first Congress of Princes (659), the struggle of principle between the imperialism (Lien-heng) of the “Roman” state of Tsin and the League-of-Nations idea (Ho-tsung) between 500 and 300, the rise of the Chinese Augustus, Hwang-ti (221)--with anything of the thoroughness that Mommsen devoted to the principate of Augustus. India, again; however completely the Indians themselves have forgotten their state-history, we have after all more available material for Buddha’s time than we have for history of the Classical ninth and eighth centuries, and yet even to-day we act as though “the” Indian had lived entirely in his philosophy, just as the Athenians (so our classicists would have us believe) spent their lives in beauty-philosophizing on the banks of the Ilissus. But even Egyptian politics receive little reflective attention. The later Egyptian historian concealed under the name “Hyksos period” the same crisis which the Chinese treat of under the name “Period of the Contending States”--here, too, is something never yet investigated. And interest in the Arabian world has reached to the frontier of the Classical tongues and no further. With what endless assiduity we have described the constitution of Diocletian, and assembled material for the entirely unimportant administrative history of the provinces of Asia Minor--because it is written in Greek. But the Sassanid state, the precedent and in every respect the model of Diocletian’s, comes into the picture only occasionally, and then as Rome’s _opponent_ in war. What about _its own_ administrative and juristic history? What is the poor sum-total of material that we have assembled for the law and economics of Egypt, India, and China[41] in comparison with the work that has been done on Greek and Roman law.