Note 81 — Chapter VII · VILLAGE LIFE AND LAND TENURE

"The whole Chinese administrative system is based on the doctrine of filial piety, in its most extended signification of duty to natural parents and also to political parents, as the Emperor's magistrates are to this day familiarly called. China is thus one vast republic of innumerable private families, or petty imperia, within one public family, or general imperium; the organisation consists of a number of self-producing and ever-multiplying independent cells, each maintaining a complete administrative existence apart from the central power. Doubtless, it is this fact which in a large measure accounts for China's indestructibility in the face of so many conquests and revolutions."—Prof. E. H. Parker in the Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society (China Branch), vol. xl. (1909), p. 14.