Page:A History of Art in Chaldæa & Assyria Vol 2.djvu/417

Comparison between Egypt and Ciiald/EA. 379 earth and its mountains ; the common people fear and worship the genii that people the air and the waters, and, still more, the spirits of their own dead. These they feel hovering about them ; they talk to them ; with touching solicitude they prepare their funeral feasts. As for the chief by whom these five hundred millions of human beings are governed, his power still preserves the absolute, theocratic, and patriarchal character that distinguishes royalty in all primitive social systems. We cannot tell what the future may have in store for China, w r hich is now in contact with the west on all its frontiers, but it is curious to think that we have as contem- poraries in one of the vastest empires in the world, a nation of men who in all their intellectual conceptions are nearer to the ancient Egyptians or Chaldseans than to a modern Englishman or Frenchman. And what adds to our surprise is that a people of whom we are sometimes inclined to speak with contempt is not more easily affected by our ideas and our scientific knowledge, and even goes so far as to add one more to the anxieties that beset the civilization of which we are so proud. Even a power like that of the United States of America takes alarm at the invasion of Chinese workmen, who do more work for less pay than men of Anglo-Saxon, Irish, or German birth. The isolation in which China has lived so long has prevented us from giving her a place in our history, but we could not ignore her altogether ; we have felt ourselves compelled to point out the close and striking resemblances that make her a sister of Egypt and Chaldaea — a younger sister indeed, but one that has survived her elders ; and the comparison is important because the example of China enables us to realize better than we otherwise could the conditions under which the industrial activities of Egypt and Chaldaea were exercised. Thanks to the data she furnishes we can understand how the workshops of Babylonia and the Nile delta were able to scatter their productions in such prodigious quantities over all the markets of Western Asia ; how objects elegant and carefully made as they were could be delivered at a price low enough to find plenty of buyers, even when the heavy charges for freight, brokerage, &c., were added to their original cost. On the fertile plains of the Euphrates and the Nile, as in the " yellow " district of China, life was so easy and food so abundant that the workman's wa^e was almost nil. , This