military classic, and even this is not very carefully scanned. Horse and foot archery are the principal tests applied to them. The mounted archer shoots six arrows at a target while at full gallop, and, to satisfy the examiners, three must find their billet. The foot archer also shoots six arrows at a target five feet five inches high, by two feet five inches broad, placed at a distance of a hundred and eightytwo feet. If he fails to plant two of these arrows in the bull's-eye he is ruthlessly plucked. Besides these exercises the candidates are expected to draw strong bows, to brandish heavy swords, and to lift weighty stones. No one who cannot raise a stone weighing from two hundred to three hundred pounds, a foot from the ground, can hope for a commission. These conditions are so simple and straightforward that there would appear to be little opportunity for those frauds and deceptions which disgrace the civil examinations; but it occasionally happens that a weakly candidate secures the services of a strong man to perform on his behalf the necessary feats expected of him. One such man was lately discovered in a ruse of this kind. By chance, or possibly as the result of a suspicion that something was wrong, the examiner suddenly called upon the genuine candidate once again to draw the strong bow. The trial was too much for him, and his excuse that he had hurt his right arm proving insufficient, he was incontinently sent about his business.

CHAPTER X.

FILIAL PIETY AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN.

As has already been said, the strange continuity of the Chinese empire is, in the opinion of some, to be attributed to the respect with which the fifth commandment of the Decalogue is observed, and as this observance of filial piety is regarded as the fundamental virtue of social life, it is worthy of a few moments' attention. Being held in this supreme estimation, it is needless to say that Confucius laid great stress upon it. He deplored that he was not able to serve his father, being dead, as he expected his son to serve him, and he defined the virtue as consisting in not being disobedient, in serving the parent when alive according to propriety, when dead in burying him according to propriety, and in sacrificing to him according to propriety. The manner of performing this duty, like other Confucian instructions, is laid down with curious minuteness. At cock-crow it is the duty of the son or daughter, who should first be dressed with scrupulous care, to go to their parents' apartment to inquire after their welfare, and to attend to their wants, and he or she, more commonly she, must so continue at their beck and call until the night again closes upon them. These duties must not be performed in a

perfunctory way, but everything must be done with the expression of cheerfulness, and filial respect and love. "When his parents are in error," says the Book of Rites, "the son, with a humble spirit, pleasing countenance, and gentle tone, must point it out to them. If they do not receive his reproof he must strive more and more to be dutiful and respectful towards them until they are pleased, and then he must again point out their error. .. . And if the parents, irritated and displeased, chastise their son until the blood flows from him, even then he must not dare to harbour the least resentment; but, on the contrary, should treat them with increased respect and dutifulness." This kind of devotion to parents seems so strained and artificial that one would be tempted at first sight to imagine that it represents merely an ideal, were it not that the records of the past and the experiences of the present reveal the existence of a precisely similar régime. For many centuries the youth of both sexes for though daughters do not partake of the privileges of sons, they share in all their dutieshave had held up to them twenty-four instances of filial piety for their guidance and imitation. They are told, for instance, of a man named Lai, who, in order to make his parents forget their great age, being himself an elderly person, used to dress himself in parti-coloured embroidered garments like a child, and disport himself before them for their amusement. They are told of a lad whose parents were too poor to provide themselves with mosquito curtains, and who used to lie naked near their bed that the insects might attack him unrestrainedly, and thus cease to annoy his parents. They are told of

a poor man who, finding it impossible to support both his mother and his child, proposed to his wife that they should bury the child alive, for, said he, "another child may be born to us, but a mother, once gone, will never return." His wife having consented, the man dug a hole of the depth of three cubits, when lo! he came upon a pot of gold, bearing the following inscription: Heaven bestows this treasure on a dutiful son; the magistrate may not seize it, nor shall the neighbours take it from him." In this story we have an instance of Chinese filial piety in excelsis, and an illustration of the effect of the Confucian warning against a selfish attachment to wife and children. It is a commonplace of Chinese morality that one or all of these should readily be sacrificed in the interests of parents, and it is interesting to find that this man, who is said to have been saved by a miracle from committing murder, has been handed down through more than twenty centuries as a model of virtue. It is unnecessary to quote any more of the twenty-four instances, but it is instructive to glance at the state of things existing at the present day, as depicted in the Peking Gazette, where cases may be met with which are scarcely less bizarre than those already referred to.

It is not long since that the great Viceroy Li Hungchang besought the emperor that a memorial arch might be erected in honour of a man within his jurisdiction. This person had been, we are told, from his youth up a devoted student of the ancient odes from a knowledge of which he early imbibed the principles of filial piety. With devotion he waited upon his widowed mother during her life