Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/26

 and Prince Eugene. We have elected, nevertheless, to pursue this course in a certain measure. To our mind, there is nothing drearier or more sickening than the minute chronicles of petty wars; wars involving no great principle, directed to no righteous end, but simply undertaken to glut the greed of the aggressor or satisfy his taste for blood; wars prompted by the meanest and most unworthy motives, and aided by the foulest perjury and intrigue. That the unification of the empire was an eventual benefit to China we do not dispute; that it called into play the powers of an almost master mind, whose boldness and originality, courage and perseverance, are more or less entitled to our admiration, will be as readily acknowledged. "What must be done," asked the King of Liang in conversation with Mencius two hundred years before, "for the empire to be tranquillised?" "It must be united under one sway," replied the philosopher. So far Shih Huang Ti seems to have been at one with Mencius. But the means he took to accomplish this great end would have been utterly condemned by that high authority. "Who can so unite it?" pursued the King. "One," replied his interlocutor, "who has no pleasure in killing men." It was by a liberal, just, and unselfish policy towards the people that the empire should have been consolidated; a wise, firm, but merciful system of government, which, as Confucius said, would have imparted joy to contiguous states and attracted distant ones. But the times of which we are writing were not calculated to produce the beneficent and prudent ruler here described; and it is no more than justice to Shih Huang Ti to say that he was the natural offspring of the period in which he lived. We shall therefore hurry over the