Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/12

 vi PREFACE. An excellent summary, from which to glean some knowledge of the Chinese, is the " Middle Kingdom " of Dr. Williams ; but to one ignorant of the Chinese people, it is but a skeleton sketch, needing flesh and colour to make it a living picture. Dr. Legge's noble work in his translation of the Chinese classics provides a more thorough and satisfactory means of judging this people, for those who are willing to take the pains to draw inferences, to learn the cause from the effect, and from philosophical principles to search out the national life producing those principles. But this is again the work of but a few ; for general readers must have aU the thinking done for them. The present work is an attempt to show what China is, by drawing, fiom Chinese national history, as life-like a represen- tation as the author is able to present of the exact position in the human family which we must assign to the Chinese people. This representation should tmfold all the various shades of character which go to make up the Chinese people, — ^the noble and the base, the mean and the honourable, — ^and should picture the unselfish patriot, as well as the man who acts only with the view of advancing his own private interests ; for all these will be found in China as in Britain. As Philosophy or Literature and (Government are, and have always been, indissolubly wedded together in China, we should also thus see Chinese philosophy exhibited in actual life, and be able to reveal the causes and explain the process of political revolutions in that country. But as it would require scores of volumes to detail Chinese universal history, the author believed his purpose would be most effectually accomplished by giving an account of the rise and progress of the reigning dynasty of China, from its earliest dawn to the zenith of its power. But in preparing materials for this history, it was found so inextricably blended with the history of