on amicable terms, while profound peace reigned on either side of the border, as a symptom of which we find that in 1176 the history of the eastern Hans was translated into Nutche for Oulo, one of the ablest and most humane of the Kin emperors.

Oulo died in 1189, regretted by his subjects as a modern Yao or Shun; and in the same year, on the death of the emperor Kao-tsong, the reigning prince also abdicated in favour of his son, Kwang-tsong, one of the most unfortunate rulers of a dynasty in which good intentions were more common than good luck. He also abdicated after a short reign in 1194. The thirty years' peace proved more advantageous to the Chinese than to the Kin; the population of the Southern empire again showed a tendency to increase, and in the latter balf of the 12th century the number of families paying tribute in the divided empire was scarcely, if at all, inferior to the number registered in all China a century before.

The Kin, on the other hand, had lost some of their skill and more of their liking for war. The troops on the frontier murmured at their hardships, and the people at the taxes imposed to provide for the extravagance of Oulo's successors. The Chinese thought to profit by the embarrassments of the Kin, as they had formerly hoped to use the Kin against the Leao, but they also had domestic traitors, and in 1206 the Tatars were introduced into Sz'chuen by an officer who hoped by their alliance to revive, for his own benefit, the separate principality of Chou. Thus the confines of the empire began to narrow in from the west as well as the north; and while the first half of Ning-tsong's reign was not unprosperous, the last fifteen years of it belong to the decline and fall of the Southern empire.

As late as 1211 the Kin claimed Genghis Khan as a tributary, and on his assuming the style of emperor (1206), they feared lest their old masters the Leao should unite with him. In 1214, the Kin prince proposed to fix his capital at Cai-fong-fu, to be out of reach of the Mongols, exactly as the Sung emperors had done to be further from the Khitan. In 1217 A.D., Ning-tsong ventured to refuse the accustomed tribute to the Kin, and the omission was not resented. Two years later the Mongols reduced Corea on the east and the kingdom of the Kara Khita on the west; and Genghis Khan began to indulge in visions of universal empire while exchanging friendly embassies with the Chinese.

In 1229, Genghis was succeeded by Ogatai, whose faithful minister Yeliu-tchoutsai, a scholar descended from the royal family of the old Leao Dynasty, urged him at once to adopt civilized methods of ruling his present empire and future conquests. The primitive custom of the Mongols was to slaughter and destroy all that came in their way; but Chinese officers in Mongol service had already prevailed on the generals to forbid this savage custom, which gave the courage of despair to the invaded people. Henceforward, instead of levelling towns, massacring their inhabitants, and turning the cultivated, fields into pasture for their herds and horses, the Mongols were instructed to spare their new sub

jects, whose labour could be made worth far more to their lords than so much grazing land.

The same virtuous minister warned his master against accepting presents from officers, which they could only make at the expense of those they governed. Much to the disgust of the Mongol chiefs, he employed two Chinese subjects of the Sung as assistant administrators, and one gets a quaint glimpse of the bearing of these haughty savages, in the midst of the civil organization of China, from a regulation (1237 A.D.) forbidding the Mongol nobles to post as heretofore free of charge along the public roads. At the same time the functions of different officers were distinguished and order established in the procedure by the introduction of seals and other symbols of administrative regularity. Hitherto, no doubt, Northern China had suffered more than the Sung empire; but Yeliutchoutsai wisely aimed at making it evident to the Chinese subjects of the Kin that they had nothing to lose by a change of masters. In 1232, Ogatai required the Kin emperor to send him among other hostages a Han-lin doctor of the house of Confucius (together with skilled embroideresses and falconers), and by his minister's advice, he received the great man's descendant with due honour and confirmed his title of Count.

In 1233, the Mongols besieged Cai-fong-fu; and after all the slaughter of the siege, 1,400,000 families were said to be left to profit by the clemency of the conqueror. In the next year the Kin emperor abdicated in favour of a younger and more active prince, as Hoei-tsong had vainly done little more than a century before, in almost identical circumstances. In the South the long and unfortunate reign of Li-tsong began in 1224; he was descended, in the tenth generation, from the founder of the house. The Chinese at first hoped to reconquer some of the Kin provinces in Central China before the Mongols had laid hands on them; but this aggression was resented, and, though they solicited peace in 1235, hostilities continued practically without intermission from that time, in the debateable ground between the Hwai and the Hoang-ho.

The education of the Mongols went on apace, and in 1237 examinations were held under their auspices, at which slaves, i.e. Chinese prisoners of war, were expressly authorized to compete, whether their owners gave consent or not. Northern China hitherto had been lightly taxed, but in 1239 a Mahomedan offered to farm the revenues for 2,200,000 taels, just twice as much as had been exacted hitherto. Yeliu-tchoutsai protested, "That is how the people are made discontented; " but Ogatai could not resist the temptation of the increased revenue, and the offer was accepted. Misery and brigandage were said to follow. The virtuous Tatar minister, whose chance of immortality would be greater if he had been blessed with a more pronounceable name, died in 1243, leaving no wealth, after a long life of power, which he had used equally for the advantage of the Mongols, his own people, and the Chinese.

One of the earliest traits recorded of his career is his collecting two

horseloads of rhubarb for the use of the sick soldiers in his army; and the argument by which he tried (unsuccessfully) to dissuade Ogatai from drinking himself to death, is worthy of a modern temperance lecturer. He called the emperor's attention to the corrosion of the iron pot used to heat his wine, and assured him that the action of the liquid on the human stomach must be still more destructive than on the iron.

We are now nearing comparatively familiar ground, and shall be able to take for granted the leading historical events, which it has hitherto been necessary to describe in brief before they could serve as landmarks in the story, so far as we have been able to trace it, of the economical development of China. In 1251, Kubla was appointed generalissimo of the Mongol armies by his brother, the fourth emperor of the dynasty. Yaochou, a Chinese scholar, who had been his teacher, was summoned to act as his adviser, and on him the mantle of Yeliu-tchoutsai seems to have fallen. The two in concert established a tribunal at Cai-fong-fu to restore agriculture and settle wandering labourers upon the land.

Kubla's rule was gentle, and carefully in accordance with Chinese laws, and his consequent popularity excited the jealousy of the Khan, who, however, was satisfied by a personal interview, of his brother's loyalty. In 1253, Kubla captured Tali in Yunnan, where his envoys had been murdered, but forbade all slaughter in imitation of the founder of the Sung Dynasty. In 1259, he crossed the Kiang, which the Southern court had been accustomed to regard as an impassable natural defence; but when the Chinese begged for peace, he was not unwilling to grant their prayer, so as to secure time for organizing his own administration, the rather as his presence was urgently required in Tatary to put down intrigues against his succession to the Mongol empire.

Li-tsong's long and inglorious reign came to an end in 1265; his successor, Tou-tsong, was a lover of wine and women, whose debaucheries were not forgotten when Marco Polo visited the lost capital of his race. He died young after a reign of nine years, leaving the crown to his son, Kongtsong, an infant of four. Sz'chuen was already in the hands of the Mongols, and in 1275, when the final campaign was begun in earnest, the only refuge for the court was supposed to be near the sea-coast, in reach of ships for Fo-kien. Marco Polo, who reached the court of Kubla in the same year, has described the conquest of his great general Peyen, a foreigner of the Si-yu or countries of the West. An appeal for mercy to the infant emperor was politely met by the reminder that the founder of the Sung Dynasty himself superseded the infant son of his late lord Chitsong.

Canton was taken in 1277, and the boy emperor died the next year. Lou-siou-fou, one of the few faithful adherents of the losing cause, insisted on proclaiming another son of Tou-tsong and taking refuge in the fleet. But the Mongols were victorious by sea as well as land; death or capture was the only choice, and the house of Sung ended, not without dignity, as

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The

the loyal Lou-siou-fou, after throwing his own wife and children into the sea, leapt after them, and sank with the child emperor in his arms. Mongol Dynasty, known as the Yuen, is reckoned to begin in 1280, the twentieth year of Kubla's reign in Northern China.

CHAPTER XV.

AGRARIAN ECONOMY AND THE INNOVATOR'S LAWS.

THE mere political chronicle of reigns and wars and treaties is far from explaining why the 320 years of Sung rule are counted among the glorious and prosperous periods of Chinese history. Even before the Tatar conquests had begun, China was less active and influential in the rest of Asia than she had been under the Hans and the Tang. And the glories of the Augustan age of Chinese literature do not seem to be tarnished in the eyes of those who, after all, are better judges than ourselves, even by the political and military incapacity which allowed the literary empire to become a prey to barbarian conquest.

It is said that Kubla, on his accession to the Northern throne, inquired if it was true, as people said, that the Buddhists had ruined the Leao and the literati the Kin. The Chinese scholar addressed declared himself unable to answer for the Leao; but as regarded the Kin, since they only employed one or two literati at most, it was not possible that this could be the cause of their fall. The military and the laity doubtless applied the remark which had reached Kubla's ears about the Kin with even more force to the Sung themselves. But it was rather the disunion than the supremacy of the learned that exercised a baleful influence on the history of China at this period; and as the idle controversies on doctrinal minutiæ ceased on the approach of real calamity, the conquered nation had all its energies free for the easy task of subjugating its invaders.

The precedents of antiquity make it impossible for educated Chinese statesmen to associate, with the life of any one dynasty, the preservation of those articles of their political creed which are really regarded as essential to national salvation. The person of the Emperor counted for very little in the sacredness of his office; the office remained, as the rules of good government remained, but any de facto emperor who adhered to the rules became invested with its sacredness. The literati of the North, in giving their allegiance to a ruler like Ogatai, with a minister like Yeliu-tchoutsai, and those of the South, in submitting to Kubla, were not either in imagination or in fact betraying their country to the foreigner; they were only recognising, to borrow the French phrase, one Chinaman the more, in the Mongol who was prepared to conform to their ideal of a constitutional

emperor.

What we are apt to regard as the tragic dismemberment of the empire, in 1125, was in the same way a matter of less regret than the wars by which