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Rh Ch‘ing fell to Ts‘oo, and Wei became dependent on one of the marquisates or kingdoms into which Tsin was divided.

Woo for a time made rapid progress, and seemed as if it would at least wrest the sovereignty of the south from Ts‘oo; but its downfall was more rapid than its rise had been. It was extinguished by Yueh a very few years after the close of the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw period, and Yueh itself had ere long to succumb to Ts‘oo.

Thus, as time went on, it became increasingly clear that the final struggle for the supreme power would be between Ts‘in and Ts‘oo. If Tsin had remained entire, it would probably have been more than a match for them both; but the elements of disorganization had long been at work in it, and it was divided, about the year B.C.400, into three marquisates. The lords of these soon claimed, all of them, the title of king, and the way in which they maintained for a century and a half the struggle with Ts‘in and Ts‘oo shows how great the power of Tsin unbroken would have been. Ts‘e and Yen also assumed the royal style, and made a gallant defence against the powers of the west and the south; but they would not have held out so long as they did but for the distance which intervened between them and the centres of both their adversaries. Ts‘in at last bore down all opposition, and though of all the great States that developed during the Ch‘un Ts‘ëw period it was the latest to make its appearance, it remained master of the ﬁeld. From the kings of Chow it cannot be said to have met with any resistance. Their history for three hundred years before the extinction of the dynasty is almost a blank. They continued to hold a nominal occupancy of the throne so long only because there were so many other princes contending for it.

The above review of the closing centuries of the dynasty of Chow, and of its overthrow by the king of Ts‘in, seems to prove, brief as it has been, that, given a number of warring States or nations, victory will in the long run declare itself in favour of that one which has the most extensive territory and the largest population. Ts‘in and Ts‘oo, when they first came into contact with the States of Chow proper, were, no doubt, inferior to them in the arts of civilization generally, and among these of the art of war; but they had vast resources and a rude energy, which compensated in the first place for want of skill, and they soon learned from their adversaries whatever was required for their effective application. A fixedness of purpose and recklessness in the expenditure of human life characterized their measures, and the struggle came at last to be mainly 119]