for themselves, instead of bringing their wives to tend their aged parents, and live all together in harmony beneath the paternal roof.  We are superior to the Chinese in our utter abhorrence of falsehood:  in the practice of filial piety they beat us out of the field.  “Spartan virtue” is a household word amongst us, but Sparta’s claims to pre-eminence certainly do not rest upon her children’s love either for honesty or for truth.  The profoundest thinker of the nineteenth century has said that insufficient truthfulness “does more than any one thing that can be named to keep back civilisation, virtue, everything on which human happiness, on the largest scale, depends”—­an abstract proposition which cannot be too carefully studied in connection with the present state of public morality in China, and the general welfare of the people.  Dr Legge, however, whose logical are apparently in an inverse ratio to his linguistic powers, rushes wildly into the concrete, and declares that every falsehood told in China may be traced to the example of Confucius himself.  He acknowledges that “many sayings might be quoted from him, in which ‘sincerity’ is celebrated as highly and demanded as stringently as ever it has been by any Christian moralist,” yet, on the strength of two passages in the Analects, and another in the “Family Sayings,” he does not hesitate to say that “the example of him to whom they bow down as the best and wisest of men, encourages them to act, to dissemble, to sin.”  And what are these passages?  In the first, Confucius applauds the modesty of an officer who, after boldly bringing up the rear on the occasion of a retreat, refused all praise for his gallant behaviour, attributing his position rather to the slowness of his horse.  In the second, an unwelcome visitor calling on Confucius, the Master sent out to say he was sick, at the same time seizing his harpsichord and singing to it, “in order that Pei might hear him.”  Dr Legge lays no stress on the last half of this story—­though it is impossible to believe that its meaning can have escaped his notice altogether.  Lastly, when Confucius was once taken prisoner by the rebels, he was released on condition of not proceeding to Wei.  “Thither, notwithstanding, he continued his route,” and when asked by a disciple whether it was right to violate his oath, he replied, “It was a forced oath.  The spirits do not hear such.”

We shall not attempt to defend Confucius on either of these indictments, taken separately and without reference to his life and teachings; neither do we wish to temper the accusations we ourselves have made against the Chinese, of being a nation of liars.  But when it is gravely asserted that the great teacher who made truthfulness and sincerity his daily texts, is alone responsible for a vicious national habit which, for aught any one knows to the contrary, may be a growth of comparatively modern times, we call to mind the Horatian poetaster, who began his account of the Trojan war with the fable of Leda and the swan.