And these institutions work well.

The machinery is simple, but it produces a vast amount of happiness and domestic virtue.

While in most parts of Asia the people are oppressed by petty tyrants, and ground down by taxes,--while they have no motive to improve their condition, since every advance will only expose them to greater extortion,--the people of China are industrious and happy.

In no part of the world has agriculture been carried to such perfection.

Every piece of ground in the cultivated parts of the empire, except those portions devoted to ancestral monuments, is made to yield two or three crops annually, by the careful tillage bestowed on it.