The village graduate who knows how to help in lawsuits by preparing complaints, and by assisting in the intricate proceedings ensuing at each stage is often able by means of the prestige thus gained, to get his living at the expense of others more ignorant. No country offers a better field for such an enterprise than China. Unbounded respect for learning coexists with unbounded ignorance, and the experienced literary man knows how to turn each of these elements to the very best account. In all lands and in all ages, the man who is possessed with what is vulgarly termed the "gift of the gab," is able to make his own way, and in China he carries everything before him. The range of territory which any aspirant for literary honours in China must expect to traverse, is, as we have seen, continental. In order to have any hope of success, he must be acquainted with every square inch of it, and must be prepared to sink an artesian well from any given point to any given depth. To the uneducated peasant, whose whole being is impregnated with a blind respect for learning, amounting at times to a kind of idolatry, such knowledge as this seems an almost supernatural acquirement, and inspires all the reverence of which he is capable. The thought of the estimate in which they will be held for the whole term of their lives, is thus a powerful stimulus to scholars of ambition, even under the greatest discouragements. There could scarcely be a better exemplification of what the Chinese saying calls "superiority to those below, and inferiority to those above," than the position of the hsiu-ts'ai. While he is looked upon by the vulgar herd in the light we have described, by the educated classes above him he is regarded, as we have so often termed him, as a schoolboy who is not yet even in school. The popular dictum avers that though the whole body of hsiu-ts'ai should attempt to start a rebellion, and should be left undisturbed in the effort for three years, the result would be failure, albeit this proverb finds no support in the history of the great rebellion, which originated with a discontented undergraduate who was exasperated at his repeated failures to get his talent recognized. Literary examinations, as we have abundantly seen, are like the game of backgammon, an equal mixture of skill and luck, but the young graduate easily comes to regard the luck as due to the skill, and thus becomes filled to the full of that intellectual pride which is one of the greatest barriers to the national progress of China.