Page:Sacred Books of the East - Volume 27.djvu/37

 The Khien-lung editors deliver their judgment on it to the following effect: When it was made, the Î Lî must have appeared, but not the Kâu Lî. Hence the Banquet and Missions appear among the "Six Subjects of Teaching," and no mention is made of the minister of Religion, as one of the six great ministers, nor is anything said of the minister of War's management of the army. On a general view of it, many subjects are evidently based on Mencius, and whole paragraphs are borrowed from him. Nothing is said of the peculiar position of the son of Heaven, because in the Han dynasty, succeeding immediately to that of Khin, the emperor was to be distinguished from, and not named along with, the feudal princes. In what is said about the reports of the Income and fixing the Expenditure, only the Grand ministers of Instruction, War, and Works are mentioned, because these were the three ducal ministers of the Han dynasty, and the ancient arrangements were represented so as to suit what had come into existence. That nothing is said about altars and investitures arose from Wan's having disregarded in that matter the advice of Hsin-yüan Phing. It only shows how much the information of the compilers exceeded that of Shû-sun Thung and Sze-mâ Hsiang-zû. The Book was received into the collection of the Lî Kî, because it was made at no great distance from antiquity. It is foolish in later scholars to weigh and measure every paragraph of it by its agreement or disagreement with Mencius and the Kâu Lî.

This account of the Wang Kih must commend itself to unprejudiced readers. To myself, the most interesting thing in the Book is the information to be gathered from it about the existence of schools in the earliest times. We see at the very commencement of history in China a