China was already old in its own eyes by the year 221 B.C. To picture that age in its proper perspective, it will be necessary, for a while, to look backwards toward an even more distant time, adjusting sight onto a day when China was young, and with what memories still extant, try to reconstruct, uncovering and making clear, that complex which caused a dawn, one magnificent moment, to explode, brilliantly and deadly, into the day of the Legalist, fortunately brief, where a God reigned on high in the guise of cruel Law--and the People suffered..
