The world is still large, and it has, and for ages will doubtless continue to have, ample room for all the additional millions which its existing millions can produce. The world was never so much in need of the Chinese as to-day, and never, on the other hand, were the Chinese more in need of the world. But if China is to hold its own, much more if it is to advance as other nations have advanced and do advance, it must be done under the lead of new forces. Confucianism has been a mighty power to build up, and to conserve. But Confucianism with its great merits has committed many "Deadly Sins," and of those sins it must ultimately suffer the penalty. Confucianism as a developing force is a force, which is spent. Sooner or later it must give way to something stronger, wiser, and better. XXIV THE MONOTONY AND VACUITY OF VILLAGE LIFE It is difficult to project ourselves backward to the times of our great-grandfathers when mails were carried on horseback, the postman leisurely knitting stockings as he rode. Yet however slow, measured by modern standards, the rural life of a century and more ago, it was a varied life, ultimately anastomosing with the great currents of the age. The rate of progress of thought has no necessary correlation to the versatility or the virility of mental processes. Our ancestors may perhaps have been peasants, but they were an integral part of the land in which they dwelt, and they rose and fell with the national tides of life like boats in a harbor. A Chinese village is physically and intellectually a fixture. Could one gaze backward through a vista of five hundred years at the panorama which that vast stretch of modern history would present, he would probably see little more and little less than he sees to-day. The buildings now standing are not indeed five hundred years old, but they are just such houses as half a millennium ago occupied the same sites, "similar and similarly situated." Some families that then lived in adobe dwellings now flourish under roofs of tile in houses of brick. Other families have become extinct. Now and then a new one may have appeared, but this is irregular and exceptional. Those who now subsist in this collection of earth-built abodes are the lineal descendants of those who lived there when Columbus discovered America. The descendants are doing just what their ancestors did, no more, no less, no other. They cultivate the same fields in the same way (albeit a few of the crops are modern); they go to the same markets in the same invariable order; buy, sell, and wear the same articles; marry and are given in marriage according to the same pattern.