Note 744 — Chapter XI · THE STATE (B) STATE AND HISTORY (continued 2)

Both, like most of the leading statesmen of the time, were pupils of Kwei-ku-tse, whose knowledge of men, deep sense of the historically possible, and command of the diplomatic technique of the age (the “Art of the vertical and the horizontal”) must have made him one of the most influential personalities of the period. Another figure of the same sort of weight after him was the thinker and war-theorist above alluded to, Sun-tse, who amongst others was the tutor of the Chancellor Lui-Si.

[Sun-Tse’s book of war, as presented in Calthrop’s translation, is comparable to nothing in Western military literature short of Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege. Clausewitz was a contemporary and product of the Napoleonic epoch, and the glow of Romanticism has not yet passed from him; Sun, on the other hand, came “later,” and his atmosphere is the shrewd factual atmosphere of pre-Cæsarism.—Tr.]