serve for pay to any power that chooses to employ them. The husbandmen, like the soldiers, follow invariably the profession of their ancestors, and occupy themselves solely in the cultivation of their lands. The tribe of mechanics is branched out into as many subdivisions as there are trades, and no man is allowed to relinquish the trade of his forefathers, a very singular system, which, as we formerly mentioned, prevailed likewise among the ancient Egyptians. Besides these four principal classes or tribes, there is a fifth, that of the pariahs, which is the outcast of all the rest. The persons who compose it are employed in the meanest offices of society. They bury the dead; they are the scavengers of the town; and so much is their condition held in detestation, that if any one of this class touches a person belonging to any of the four great castes, or tribes, it is allowable to put him to death upon the spot. All these classes, or castes, are separated from each other by insurmountable barriers; they are not allowed to intermarry, to live, or to eat together, and whoever transgresses these rules is banished as a disgrace to his tribe. It is well observed by the Abbé Raynal, that this artificial arrangement, which is antecedent to the tradition of known records, is a most striking proof of the great antiquity of this nation; since nothing appears more contrary to the natural progress of the social connections, and such an idea could only be the result of a studied plan of legislation, which pre-supposes a great proficiency in civilization and knowledge.

Between the years 1751 and 1760 the English East India Company conquered and obtained possession of the finest provinces of Hindostan-Bengal, Bahar, and part of Orissa, a territory equal in dimensions to the kingdom of France, abounding in manufacturing towns, possessed of an immense population, and yielding a magnificent revenue; and these territories have been constantly and rapidly extending from that period. The East India Company thence has the benefit of the whole trade of India, Arabia, Persia, Thibet, and China; and, with the exception of some settlements ceded to the Dutch, of the whole of Eastern Asia.

CHAPTER XXIV.

CHINA AND JAPAN:-Tartar Revolutions-Posterity of Gengis-Khan finally maintain Possession of the Throne-Pretensions to Antiquity considered.

PROCEEDING eastward in the Asiatic continent, the next great empire which solicits our attention is that of China. Towards the end of the thirteenth century, the Tartar posterity of Gengis-Khan were possessed of the sovereignty of China, of India, and Persia. The branch of this Tartar family which then reigned in China was termed Yuen for the conquerors adopted both the name and the manners of the people whom they conquered. The Chinese were at this time a much more polished people than there invaders, who, therefore, very wisely retained their laws and system of government. The consequence was an easy submission upon the part of the Chinese, who, while they were allowed to follow in quiet and security their ordinary method of life, were very indif ferent who sat upon the throne. After this conquest there were nine successive emperors of the family of the Tartars, nor was there the least attempt by the Chinese to expel these foreigners. One of the grandsons of Gengis-Khan was, indeed, assassinated in his imperial palace, but it was by one of his own countrymen, a Tartar; and his next heir succeeded to the throne without the smallest opposition.

At length indolence and luxury put an end to this race of monarchs. The ninth emperor in descent from Gengis-Khan abandoned himself to the most effeminate pleasures, and giving up the whole administration to a set of priests, excited at length both the contempt and abhorrence of his subjects. A rebellion was raised by one of the bonzes, and the Tartars were utterly extirpated from China in the year 1357. The Chinese were now governed for two hundred and seventy-six years by their native princes; but at the end of this period a second revolution gave the throne once more to the Tartars. This revolution affords a singular picture of the national character of the Chinese. Some violences committed against the Mantchou Tartars had given high provocation to this warlike people, and they determined to invade the empire. Their attempt was favored by an insurrection in some of the provinces; the Tartars met with very little resistance. The rebel Chinese, headed by a mandarin of the name of Listching, joined themselves to the Tartarian army, and both together took possession of

the imperial city of Pekin. The conduct of the Chinese emperor is unparalleled in history: without making the smallest attempt to defend his capital or maintain possession of his throne, he shut himself up in his palace, and commanded forty of his wives to hang themselves in his presence; he then cut off his daughter's head, and ended the catastrophe by hanging himself. The Tartars took possession of Pekin, and their prince Taitsong pursued his conquests till the whole empire submitted to his authority. This, which is the last revolution that China has undergone, happened in the year 1641; since which time the empire has peaceably submitted to the government of the Tartar princes who are now upon the throne, and who, like their predecessors of the race of Gengis-Khan, very wisely maintain the Chinese laws, manners, and customs, without innovation.

The history of this celebrated empire has afforded a most fertile field of historical controversy. While the Chinese annals, which go back for some thousands of years beyond our vulgar era, are, by some authors, esteemed incontrovertible-while the government and political establishment of this empire are vaunted as a most perfect model of an excellent constitution, and the knowledge of the Chinese in the arts and their acquaintance with the sciences are supposed to have preceded, by many ages, the first dawnings of either in the European kingdoms,-there are other authors, no less respectable for the solidity of their judgment and the extent of their information, who are disposed to treat all these accounts as a gross exaggeration and imposture; who consider the boasted antiquity of this great empire, or, at least, the authenticity of its ancient history, as an absurd chimera-the policy and government of China as an establishment meriting no encomium-and the abilities of the Chinese in the arts, and progress in the sciences, even of those which they are supposed to have practised for thousands of years, to be, at this day, extremely low and inconsiderable. Voltaire and the Abbé Raynal are the most distinguished advocates of the hyperbolical antiquity of this singular people; and the fables of the Chinese have received from them a credence which might not have been so readily accorded, had they not afforded to these authors an opportunity of throwing discredit on the Mosaic accounts of the creation and of the deluge.

The empire of China, say these authors, has subsisted in splen dor for above four thousand years, without having undergone any material alteration in its laws, manners, language, or even in the mode and fashion of dress. Its history, which is incontestable, being the only one founded on celestial observations, is traced by the most accurate chronology so high as an eclipse calculated two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years before our vulgar era, and verified by the missionaries skilled in mathematics. Father Gaubil nas examined a series of thirty-six eclipses of the sun recorded in the books of Confucius, and found only two of them dubious, and

two spurious. Thus the Chinese have joined the celestial to the terrestrial history, and proved the one by the other. "In the history of other nations," says Voltaire, we find a mixture of fable, allegory, and absurdity; but the Chinese have written their history with the astrolabe in their hands, and with a simplicity unexampled in that of any other of the Asiatic nations." Every reign of their emperors has been written by a contemporary historian, nor is there any contradiction in their chronology. With regard to the population of the empire," says Voltaire, "there are in China, by the most accurate computation, one hundred and thirty millions of inhabitants, and of these, not less than sixty millions of men capable of bearing arms. The emperor's ordinary revenue is about fifty-two millions sterling. The country of China is greatly favored by nature, producing every where, and in the utmost abundance, all the European fruits, and many others to which the Europeans are strangers. The Chinese have had a manufacture of glass for two thousand years; they have made paper of the bamboo from time immemorial; and they invented the art of printing in the time of Julius Cæsar. The use of gunpowder they have possessed beyond all memory, but they employed it only in ornamental fireworks."

They have been great observers of the heavens, and proficients in astronomy, from time immemorial. They were acquainted with the compass, but only as a matter of curiosity, not applying it to navigation. "But what the Chinese best understood," says Voltaire, is morality and the laws; morality they have brought to the highest perfection. Human nature is addicted there, as in other countries, to vice, but is more restrained by the laws. All the poor in this extensive empire are maintained at the expense of government. A certain modesty and decorum softens and tempers the manners of the Chinese, and this gentleness and civility reaches even to the lowest class of the people. In China, the laws not only inflict punishment on criminal actions, but they reward virtue. This morality and this submission to the laws, joined to the worship of a Supreme Being, constitute the religion of China, as professed by the emperor and men of literature. Confutzee, or Confucius, who flourished two thousand three hundred years ago, was the founder of this religion, which consists in being just and beneficent. He has no divine honors paid to himself, but he has such as a man deserves who has given the purest ideas that human nature, unassisted by revelation, can form of the Supreme Being. Yet various sects of idolaters are tolerated in China, as a grosser sort of food is proper for the nourishment of the vulgar."

Such is the picture of this eastern empire drawn by M. de Voltaire and the Abbé Raynal. To show what portion of it belongs to historic truth, and what to the imagination of its authors, we shall consider separately the state of the sciences in China, the

state of the arts, the government and laws of this empire, and the progress of the Chinese in religion, philosophy, and morality.

First, with regard to the state of the sciences. "The prodigious antiquity of the Chinese empire," says M. de Voltaire, "is authenticated beyond a doubt by astronomical observations, particularly by a series of eclipses of the sun, going back so far as two thousand one hundred and fifty-five years before our vulgar era." The evidence of this fact of the series of eclipses, it is to be observed, in the first place, rests upon the authority of certain Jesuits, who, travelling as missionaries into that empire, from which it is a piece of national policy to exclude all strangers, were obliged to court and purchase the privilege of residence in the country by the grossest flattery and adulation of the emperor. Some of these, being men of science, were employed to examine and to put in order the astronomical apparatus in the observatory of Pekin, and to teach their learned men the use of those instruments of which they were possessed, but of which they were grossly ignorant. These Jesuits themselves relate that, about the beginning of the last century, the science of astronomy was so low among the Chinese, that some of their mathematicians, having made a false calculation of an eclipse, upon being accused to the emperor, defended themselves by saying, that their whole calendar was erroneous. The Jesuits were hereupon employed to rectify it-a circumstance which gained them no small credit in the empire.

Now let it be supposed that a modern mathematician, having access to the Chinese astronomical observations, should find that most of those eclipses recorded were calculated with accuracy, it may be asked, what, after all, would this prove? Any ordinary mathematician, who can calculate a single eclipse, can calculate backwards a whole series of them for thousands of years. Thus any man who wished to compile a history fictitious from beginning to end, might, while sitting in his closet, in this way authenticate every remarkable event by eclipses and astronomical observations which would stand the strictest scrutiny. Thus every event in the famous history of Arthur and his Round Table, cr of the Seven Champions of Christendom, might have its date authenticated by eclipses and astronomical observations, and consequently (according to the argument of M. de Volaire) be entitled to the credit of a history as incontestable as the annals of China.

But to come to a more particular examination of this boasted knowledge of the Chinese in astronomy, let us attend, in the first place, to a few facts. In the year 1670, the Chinese astronomers had gone so totally wrong in their calculations, that by a false intercalation the year was found to consist of thirteen months. To remedy this error, an imperial edict was issued for the printing of forty-five thousand new almanacs, three thousand of which were distributed in each province of the empire.