Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/107

voyager, so stands the Kiun-tsu of Confucius among the ideal men of pagan moralists. The immeasurable influence in after ages of the character thus portrayed proves how lofty was his own standard, and the national conscience has ever since assented to the justice of the portrait."

It is in the ethics of Confucius that foreign inquirers must seek a true portrayal of Chinese character. Nowhere else is it to be found. Confucius may almost be supposed to have projected his vision into a future twenty-five centuries distant when he said, "I hate the way in which smartness of speech is liable to destroy kingdoms and ruin families." Smartness of speech has been the destroyer of China's good name. One after another Western critics have aired their cleverness at her expense, converting their shallow experiences into profound generalisations, substituting flowers of rhetoric for conscientious observation, and hiding the assumption of knowledge under graces of diction. Yet, if it were known that from time immemorial a certain scripture had constituted the moral food of a community; that every educated unit of the community had been taught to revere that scripture, to commit its tenets to memory, and to regard its ideals as the highest standards of human attainment, would it not be to its pages that a reasoning man would turn for an exposition of the principles informing the community's conduct and moulding the disposition of its mem-