It would be impossible even to enumerate the many posts and types of organization in the administration of imperial China.(46) Its most conspicuous features may be enumerated as follows: China consisted of half a million cities, towns, villages, and hamlets, each to a large extent autonomous.(47) These were divided among, roughly, two thousand _hsien_, in each of which an over-burdened District Magistrate sought to carry out all the recognized functions of government in so far as they applied to his locality. He did this largely by negotiation with the leaders of the social groups in his bailiwick, the heads of families, the elders of villages, the functionaries of _hui_. He was supervised by a variety of travelling prefects and superintendents, but the next officer above him who possessed a high degree of independence was the viceroy or governor—whichever type happened to rule the province or group of provinces. Except for their non-hereditability, these last offices were to all intents and purposes satrapies. The enormous extent of the Chinese civilized world, the difficulty of communicating with the capital, the cumbersomeness of the administrative organization, the rivalry and unfriendliness between the inhabitants of various provinces—all these encouraged independence of a high degree. If Chinese society was divided into largely autonomous communes, the Chinese political system was made up of largely autonomous provinces. Everywhere there was elasticity. At the top of the whole structure stood the Emperor. In the mystical doctrines which Confucianism transmitted from the animism of the feudal ages of China, the Emperor was the intermediary between the forces of nature and mankind. The Son of Heaven became the chief ritualist; in more sophisticated times he was the patron of civilization to the scholars, and the object of supernatural veneration to the uneducated. His function was to provide a constant pattern of propriety. He was to act as chief of the scholars. To the scholars the ideology was recognized as an ideology, albeit the most exact one; to the common people it was an objective reality of thought and value. As the dictates of reason were not subject to change, the power and the functions of the Emperor were delimited; he was not, therefore, responsible to himself alone. He was responsible to reason, which the people could enforce when the Emperor failed. Popular intervention was regarded as _de jure_ in proportion to its effectiveness _de facto_. The Imperial structure might be called, in Western terms, the constitutionalism of common sense.(48) The Dragon Throne did not enjoy the mysterious and awful prestige which surrounds the modern Tenno of Nippon; although sublime in the Confucian theory, it was, even in the theory, at the mercy of its subjects, who were themselves the arbiters of reason. There was no authority higher than reason; and no reason beyond the reason discovered and made manifest in the ages of antiquity.