14. EXCLUSIVE AND JEALOUS SPIRIT.--Some reservation must accompany the encomiums justly due Jewish education. With respect to the rest of the human race, the Jewish spirit was mean, narrow, and malevolent. The Israelites of this day have retained something of these jealous and exclusive tendencies. At the beginning of the Christian era, the fierce and haughty patriotism of the Jews led them to proscribe whatever was of Gentile origin, whatever had not the sanction of the national tradition. Nothing of Greek or Roman culture penetrated this closed world.[18] The Jewish doctors covered with the same contempt him who raises hogs and him who teaches his son Greek science. 15. EDUCATION AMONG THE CHINESE.--We have attempted to throw into relief the educational practices of two Eastern nations to which the civilization of the West is most intimately related. A few words will suffice for the other primitive societies whose history is too little known, and whose civilization is too remote from our own, to make their plans of education anything more than an object of curiosity. China has been civilized from time immemorial, and at every period of her long history she has preserved her national characteristics. For more than three thousand years an absolute uniformity has characterized this immobile people. Everything is regulated by tradition. Education is mechanical and formal. The preoccupation of teachers is to cause their pupils to acquire a mechanical ability, a regular and sure routine. They care more for appearances, for a decorous manner of conduct, than for a searching and profound morality. Life is but a ceremonial, minutely determined and punctually followed. There is no liberty, no glow of spontaneity. Their art is characterized by conventional refinement and by a prettiness that seems mean; there is nothing of the grand and imposing. By their formalism, the Chinese educators are the Jesuits of the East. 16. LÂO-TSZE AND KHUNG-TSZE.--Towards the sixth century B.C. two reformers appeared in China, Lâo-tsze and Khung-tsze. The first represents the spirit of emancipation, of progress, of the pursuit of the ideal, of protest against routine. He failed. The second, on the contrary, who became celebrated under the name of Confucius, and to whom tradition ascribes more than three thousand personal disciples, secured the triumph of his ideas of practical, utilitarian morality, founded upon the authority of the State and that of the family, as well as upon the interest of the individual. A quotation from Lâo-tsze will prove that human thought, in the sixth century B.C., had reached a high mark in China:--