Confucius was at once the world’s greatest college professor and its most influential editor. His school instructed three thousand pupils in ethics and etiquette. His writings have influenced more minds than those of any other human individual, and his supremacy is the triumph of uninspired work. His moral tone is lofty,--as witness his “Do not unto another what you would not have done to yourself,”--but his life brought no great new message. “I am a commentator, not an originator,” he said of himself. Mang-tse, “Master Mang,” whom we know as Mencius, followed “Master Kung” by one hundred years, applying, as a practical reformer, to the society of the day, the maxims of his enlightened philosophy, rebuking princes and giving to the Chinese world the last of its classics. In the glories of the Chu Dynasty, China, the earliest offshoot of the Mongol race, reached its literary and philosophic climax. In Turan, now called Turkestan, and in Mesopotamia, a western division of the Mongols appears about 640 B.C. It is making an incursion into the declining Empire of Assyria, over which Nebuchadnezzar is soon to rule. Nothing of detail remains, only the record of the devastating inroad over the mountain; but it locates at this date the southwestern frontier of Mongol dominion. Scythia, north of the Black Sea, reveals them next. The sketch is drawn by the master-pen of the Greek father of history in his description of the expedition of Darius, 506 B.C. “Having neither cities nor forts, they carry their dwellings with them wherever they go,” Herodotus writes, describing the nomad foes of the Great King. He relates that they are “accustomed, moreover, one and all of them, to shoot from horseback and to live not by husbandry, but on their cattle.” This was the enemy against whom Darius planned a campaign, whose object was to free from the menace of the Scythians north of the line of advance his prospective expedition for the conquest of Greece. From the bridge of boats over the Hellespont, beside which Miltiades watched, the great Persian marched to the Don River, the nomads always retreating. Darius finally challenged the Scythian king to stand and fight, or to accept him as suzerain. To this message Idonthyrsus replied: “This is my way, Persian. I never fear men or fly from them, nor do I now fly from thee. I only follow my common mode of life in peaceful years. We Scythians have neither towns nor cultivated lands, which might induce us, through fear of being taken or ravaged, to be in any hurry to fight with you. In return for thy calling thyself my lord, I say to thee, ‘Go weep!’” All the Asian steppes were open to the ever-retreating nomads: Darius was obliged to halt. Hereupon, the Scythian prince, understanding how matters stood, dispatched a herald to the Persian camp with presents for the king. They were “a bird, a mouse, a frog, and five arrows.”