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ditions, and conservation of materials and uses, that it is no less than a Religion of Labor. These results are stupendous in amount; their services invaluable to civilized life; their elements organized in stable and productive processes with a fidelity nowhere equalled. The visionary splendors of Far Cathay for mediæval fancy are surpassed by the realities of her practical resource and splendid gifts to modern civilization. Her over-speed from head to hand, her absorption in the concrete, her plodding conformity to fixed ideals, bid us pause to observe what moral and spiritual secret hides in an earnestness so effective on a ground so confined.
Confined it surely is. In all this wealth and orderly construction there is defect of inner relation; of that power of combining phenomena to large results, which is requisite to science; and of that openness to fresh maxims and formulas which is essential to progress. These failings are so familiar in Chinese labor, that they have almost seemed to belong there exclusively; and we are apt to forget that they are precisely the obstacles which have beset science in the West, and which neither the friction of races, nor the supposed tendency of Christianity to emancipate the mind, had overthrown, or even shaken, as late as a hundred years ago. It is only within that period that we can find a basis even for the distinction drawn by Ampere, which allows the West the power to "apply and perfect" what the East "invents and preserves."
In accounting for the unprogressive element in arts and sciences pursued with such devotion, we must remember that, in so vast a population as the Chinese, cheapness of labor will naturally foreclose the use of machinery: an immense demand for employment does not favor the growth of labor-saving inventions; and simple tastes and easy subsistence will maintain old processes of industry against whatever tends to their disturb-
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