The “She-King” is full of poems which relate to the drinking habits of the ancient Chinese, and one of them, called “The _Pin-che-tsoo-yen_: Narrative against Drunkenness,”[44] too long for transference to these pages, gives a vivid picture of the licence of the period. It describes an archery match, followed by a festival, at which many of the guests became intoxicated, and their behaviour is narrated in rather amusing terms, one verse telling the reader that— “They dance about, now fast now slow, Can hardly keep their feet; What fools they are they do not know, No one resumes his seat.” The perusal of this poem, which we should recommend to the reader who is curious in such matters, shows that many of our customs date back as far as those ancient days. The company began by drinking the health of the ruling sovereign, and at the head of the table was a “chairman,” who decided disputes, and was assisted by a “vice.” Both poetry and prose records, then, indicate to us that in the very earliest times there already existed in China those drinking propensities which have exercised so powerful an influence for evil upon the character of nations. The odes and poems range over a period of two or three thousand years, and there may have been times at which comparative sobriety was a national characteristic, as it has again become in modern China and in the East generally; but certain facts are clear, namely, that in ancient China all classes of society, from the king to the peasant, indulged freely in “spirits,” or intoxicating drinks prepared from cereals; that the use of such drinks was sanctioned by the priests in their religious ceremonials, and that their consumption entered largely, as in our day, into the practice of hospitality. Great efforts were evidently made both by legislative enactments of the severest kind, and through the teaching of sages, to suppress drunkenness, which threatened at one time to subvert the Empire. Nay, it is probable that the excessive use of drink and its accompanying vices caused the downfall of one or more dynasties, and it is quite certain that the people rose in rebellion against their debauched rulers and their servants, whose tyranny was aggravated by their drinking propensities, and who themselves committed the very crimes from which they should have protected the masses. But how a people whose history, three thousand years since, presented such features as these, should not only have maintained their national existence, but should have become sober, it is difficult to explain. The change is no doubt owing chiefly to the spread of the Buddhist religion in China. In the practices of the ancient idolatry drunkenness was a prominent characteristic, as we shall find it to have been also in the religious observances of the Aryan nations; but Gautama Sâkya, the Buddha (or enlightened), who lived in India about the sixth century, B.C.,[45] founded a religion in which total abstinence was a