Atlanta tri-weekly journal. [volume] (Atlanta, Ga.) 1920-19??, 1923-01-18
THE OUTLINE OF HISTORY
BY H. G. WELLS

soon as thew ming.e their waters in the holy
river so all who believe in Buddha cease to
be Brahmins, Kshatrivas. Vaisyas and
Sudras." His teaching prevailed in INDIA Tor
some centuries; it spread over CHINA, Ilpet,
Japan, Burmah, Ceylon, Turkestan, Man
churia; it is today the religion OF large
fraction of the human race but 1t was tlnall.
defeated and driven out of Indian life by the
vitality and persistence of the Brahmins and
of their caste ideas
The Chinese System
In China we fin1 social system travelling
along yet another, and only a very rough
ly parallel line to that followed by the In
dian and Western civilizations. The Chinese
civilization even more than the Hindu Is or
ganized for peace, and the warrior plays
small part in it's social scheme.
AS in the Indian civilization, the loading
class is an intellectual one; less pr1esty
than the Brahmin and more official. But
unlike the Brahmins, the mandar1ns, VINO are
the literate men Of China are not a caste;I
one is not a mandarin by birth, but by edu-
cation and examination from all classes or
the community, and the son OF mandarla
has no prescriptive right to succeed MS
father.
AS consequence of these differences.
while the Brahmins of india are, as class.
ignorant even of their own sacred books,
mentally slack, and full of pretentious as
surance, the Chinese mandarin has the en-
ergy that comes from hard mental work. But
since his education so far has been almost
entirely a scholarly study of the classical
Chinese literature, his influence has been en-.
tirey conservative Before the days OF Alex
agder the Great, China had already formed
itself and set it's feet in the way in which it
was still walking in the year 1000 A. ID. ln-
vaders and dynasties had come and gone, but
the routine Of life OF the yellow CIVILIZATION
remained unchanged.
The traditional Chinese social system rec
ognized four main classes below the priest
emperor.
(a) The literary class, which was equiva-
lent partly to the officials of the Western
world and partly 70 US teachers and clerks. III
the time of Confucius it's education, included
archery and horsemanship. Rites and music,
history and mathematics completed the six
accomplishments
OBJ The cultivators of the land.
(c) Tie artisans.
Cd The mercantile class.
But since from the earliest times it has
been the Chinese way to divide the landed
possessions of a man among all his sons,
there has never been in Chinese history any
class of great 1andoT ners, renting their land
to tenants, such as most other countries nave
displayed. The Chinese land has always been
cut into small holdings which are chiefly
freeholds, and cultivated lntenslVely.
The Last Man Loses
There are landlords in China who own
one or a few farms and rent them to tenants,
but there are no great permanent estates.
When a patch of land by repeated division
is too small to sustain a man 1t is sold to
some prospecting neighbor, and the former
owner drifts to one of the great towns OF
China to Join the mass of wage earning
workers there In China for many centuries
there have been these masses of town popu-
lation with scarcely any property at all, men
neither serfs nor slaves, but held to their
daily work by their utter impecuniousness,
needed for the making of canals, the build
ing of walls and the like has been drawn.
The war captive and the slave class play
smaller part in Chinese history than in any
more westerly record of these ages before
me Christian era.
Copyright, 1922, by the Macmillan Com
pany. Published by arrangement with Inc
Mcclure Newspaper Syndicate.)