Next in importance, among Chinese social groups, after the family and the village was the _hui_. It was in all probability the last to appear. Neither ordained, as the family seemed to be, by the eternal physical and biological order of things, nor made to seem natural, as was the village, by the geographic and economic environment, the association found its justification in the deeply ingrained propensities of the Chinese to coöperate. Paralleling and supplementing the former two, the _hui_ won for itself a definite and unchallenged place in the Chinese social structure. The kinds of _hui_ may be classified into six categories:(44) 1) the fraternal societies; 2) insurance groups; 3) economic guilds; 4) religious societies; 5) political societies; and 6) organizations of militia and vigilantes. The _hui_ made up, in their economic form, the greater part of the economic organization of old China, and provided the system of vocational education for persons not destined to literature and administration. Politically, it was the _hui_—under such names as the Triad and the Lotus—that provided the party organizations of old China and challenged the dynasties whenever objectionable social or economic conditions developed. The old Chinese society, made up of innumerable families, villages, and _hui_, comprised a whole “known world.” Its strength was like that of a dinosaur in modern fable; having no one nerve-centre, the world-society could not be destroyed by inroads of barbarians, or the ravages of famine, pestilence, and insurrection. The ideology which has been called Confucian continued. At no one time were conditions so bad as to break the many threads of Chinese culture and to release a new generation of persons emancipated from the tradition. Throughout the centuries education and government went forward, even though dynasties fell and the whole country was occasionally over-run by conquerors. The absence of any juristically rigid organization permitted the Chinese to maintain a certain minimum of order, even in the absence of an emperor, or, as more commonly occurred, in the presence of several.