Professor W.D. Whitney, who is usually so well worth listening to, fails to recognise this fact in his interesting essay on "China and the Chinese" (_Oriental and Linguistic Studies_, 2nd series). He declares that "according to the ordinary march of events in human history, the Chinese empire should have perished from decay, and its culture either have become extinct or have passed into the keeping of another race, more than two thousand years ago. It had already reached the limit to its capacity of development" (p. 88). Similarly Ratzel pronounces (_History of Mankind_, Eng. tr. 1896, i, 26) that "Voltaire hits the point when he says Nature has given the Chinese the organ for discovering all that is _useful_ to them, but not for going _any further_." Voltaire never penned such a "bull." He wrote (_Essai sur les moeurs_, Avant-Propos, ch. i), "Il _semble_ que la Nature ait donné," and "_nécessaire_," not "useful." Even that has a touch of paralogism; but the great essayist goes on to suggest two causes for Chinese conservatism--their ancestral piety and the nature of their method of writing. The first is a pseudo-explanation; the second is a _vera causa_, though only one of those involved. The German specialist of to-day is really further from the scientific point of view than the French wit of the middle of the eighteenth century, going on as he does to decide that "defect in their endowments" causes the mediocrity of the Chinese, and "also is the sole cause of the rigidity in their social system."