128 THE HONGKONG GOVERNMENT GAZETTE, 4TH FEBRUARY, 1880.
woman during marriage in that of her husband. Or consider, as a third instance, but unum de multis, the powerful hold which the idea of aristocracy, as implying a superior quality of blood in so-called old families, still has on the popular mind of the West, America not excluded.
The foregoing will, I trust, suffice to show that the term "slavery" is bound up with the peculiar development of the social life and the legal theories of the progressive Societies of the West. It has indeed such a peculiar meaning attached to it that one ought to hesitate before applying the term rashly to the corresponding relation of a social organism like that of China which had an entirely different history and has hitherto been socially unconnected with those highly developed Societies. But I believe also to have shown that in Greek, Roman and modern society the practice of slavery always required some ingenious justification before the tribunal of the moral sense; in other words, that ever since the social organisms of the West emerged from archaic patriarchalism, so long retained by the ancient Romans, and especially by the Sclavonians and a few other Indo-Germanic nations, slavery had no natural place in them. Its gradual dissolution was but a question of time.
Whilst thus the idea of absolute rights inherent in men and the recognition of the absolute equality of every human being has been slowly and gradually evolved in the West and thereby procured, in the course of ages, the virtual abolition of slavery, we find an entirely different development of the same ideas in China. That flower and fruit of modern Christian civilization, the practical realisation of the consciousness of the common fatherhood of God and the universal brotherhood of man, as the heirloom of every human creature, has been the very seedcorn and root from which the Chinese social organism has sprung up. That Heaven and Earth are the common parent of all human creatures, that all men within the four seas (i. e. all people that on earth do dwell) are brethren, is the keynote of the religious, social and political teaching of the most ancient Chinese Classics. In that ancient period of Chinese history, which is still looked upon as the classical norm and guide for the present and future, the Chow dynasty (founded 1,122 B. C. ), slavery was abolished in every form except that of the condemned criminal. Although slavery was re-established by the Han dynasty (3rd century B. C.), which developed the patria potestas to such an extent as to give parents the right to sell their children in case of extreme poverty, and although slavery, in a certain form and to a certain extent, has existed in China ever since, yet it is necessary to observe the radical differences which separate the system of slavery in vogue in China, from that of the West. To understand, however, the exact position which the slave occupies in the social organism of China, we must first of all observe the point at which social life in China has arrived in its process of evolution from barbarism.
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The stage which China, two thousand years ago, reached in the history of its social and political development and in which it has on the whole remained ever since, through its inveterate habit of looking to the past for an ideal of the present, is correctly designated by the term "patriarchalism,' though the social organism in its ceaseless absorption of new ideas is gradually breaking through the bond- age of patriarchalism in sundry points. The main idea of Chinese patriarchalism is that the male parent, as the patriarch of a definite family household, is the representative of the. "family" which is the prin- cipal organized expression of the State. The supremacy of the male parent is enhanced by the necessity. of continued sacrifices to the spirits of deceased ancestors. There lies therefore at the bottom of this system of patriarchalism the political necessity of a unitary household, as the substratum of the State, and the religious necessity of a positive central authority for sacred rites. The patriarch is thus in- vested with a power over every member of his family consisting of one or more wives, children, grand- children, and so forth, also of hired servants and possibly slaves, every one of whom has a fixed relation to the "family," guaranteed by the whole social state, and all are subject to the same patria potestas. In a State thus based on patriarchalism the idea of personal liberty, of absolute rights possessed by every individual, as conceived by the civilization of the West, has no apparent room, although it is contained in it as the leaf is contained in the plant at every stage of its growth. Nor is there any room for that absolute slavery which for so many centuries disfigured Western civilization. Every member of the family or household, the wife, the concubine, the child, the servant, the slave, merges his or her individual existence in the "family," which is legally the only "person" existing in China. The Chinese mind cannot comprehend any basis for individual relations apart from the relations of the family. Yet each individual has a definite place as a person, not as a property, reserved to him in this imperium in imperio, the empire of the pater familias, which place is guaranteed to him and guarded by the State. None is indeed sui juris, for all under the patria potestas, but the latter has its fixed limits. The mother, although but a purchased Agnate, becomes the depositary of the patria potestas with the death of the father. The father of the family himself, although endowed with the jus vitæ necisque, is for every exercise of his power affecting the life of any one, subject to his patria potestas, answerable to the State. Moreover he has as many duties as he has rights. He is solidarily responsible for any crime committed by any member, servant, or slave of his family, whereby crime becomes a corporate act and the extent of moral responsibility, thus laid upon the house-father, a serious burden. In a family thus constituted none can be free, but at the same time the bondage under which all are, in their several ways, is not a mark of tyranny, but of religious unity, a bond of equality and mutual regard.
It must be clearly understood, however, that the "family," which thus forms the unit of the Chinese system of patriarchalism, is not what we understand to be a family, but strictly speaking, one of those legal fictions with which the Chinese social system, like every other archaic organism, abounds. The Chinese family really means the circle of those who are under one and the same patria potestas, whether
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