Danger of war was threatening. Rivalry and strife had be-
come the order of the day. Good institutions of the past
seemed tumbling under the blows of the feudal struggle. A
protracted period of peace, such as had existed during past
dynasties, seemed an impossibility. Confucius saw the evils
of decentralization and war: he sought to substitute for
them centralization and peace.

The most conspicuous point of his philosophy, then, was
monarchism as the means to centralization and peace. He
compared the oneness of political authority in a state
to the oneness of the sun in Heaven. This, however, should
not be confused with absolutism of the monarch or divine
right. This he objected to as much as to lawless force and
disorder. But he made the monarch the center of his phil-
osophy. Every phase of his political discussion took place
on or around the monarch. By so doing, he aimed to make
the institution of a monarch the commencement of stabili-
zation. Here his practical knowledge of human nature was
fully availed of. He did not try to glorify or deify the lucky
or poor man on the throne; nor did he take away the heavy
responsibility from him so as to make him unable to com-
mit a wrong. To the monarch, the philosopher first gave
wide powers, though his powers were to be modified by
other institutions. First a liaison between the state and
the family was made. The ruler was a "king-father," the
mandarins "parent-officials," and the people "children-
people." The shrewd old scholar witnessed and believed in
the fallibility of political institutions on the one side, and
the infallibility of the family system on the other. By mak-
ing this liaison he endeavored to imbue the organization of
the state with some of the elements that made the family
system stable, and his attempt proved a success. Thus, the
patriarchal element within the Chinese monarchism checked
the absolutism of the monarch. In all Confucius' works,
ethics was taught side by side with political theory; in many
cases these two branches of human knowledge were so inter-
mingled that it is almost impossible to separate one from

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