THE charge or charges recorded in this Book were given in the hundredth year of the king's age. The king, it is again understood, was Mû; and the hundredth year of his age would be B.C. 952. The title of the Book in Chinese is simply 'Lü's Punishments,' and I conclude that Lü or the marquis of Lü, was a high minister who prepared, by the king's orders, a code of punishments for the regulation of the kingdom, in connexion with the undertaking, or the completion, of which the king delivered to his princes and judges the sentiments that are here preserved. The common view is that Lü is the name of a principality, the marquis of which was Mû's Minister of Crime. Where it was is not well known, and as the Book is quoted in the Lî Kî several times under the title of 'Fû on Punishments,' it is supposed that Lü and Fû (a small marquisate in the present Ho-nan) were the same. The whole Book is divided into seven chapters. The first is merely a brief introduction, the historiographer's account of the circumstances in which king Mû delivered his lessons. Each of the other chapters begins with the words, 'The king said.' The first two of them are an historical resumé of the lessons of antiquity on the subject of punishments, and an inculcation on the princes and officers of justice to give heed to them, and learn from them. The next two tell the princes of the diligence and carefulness to be employed in the use of punishments, and how they can make punishments a blessing. The fourth chapter treats principally of the commutation or redemption of punishments, and has been very strongly condemned by critics and moralists. They express their surprise that such a document should be in the Shû, and, holding that the collection was made by Confucius, venture to ask what the sage meant by admitting it. There is, in fact, no evidence that the redemption of punishments on the scale here laid down, existed in China before Mû's time. It has entered, however, into the penal code of every subsequent dynasty. Great official corruption and depravation of the general morality would seem to be inseparable from such a system. The fifth chapter returns again to the 1. In reference to the charge to the marquis of Lü:--When the king had occupied the throne till he reached the age of a hundred years, he gave great consideration to the appointment of punishments, in order to deal with (the people of) the four quarters. 2. The king said, 'According to the teachings of ancient times, Khih Yû was the first to produce disorder, which spread among the quiet, orderly people, till all became robbers and murderers, owl-like and yet self-complacent in their conduct, traitors and villains, snatching and filching, dissemblers and oppressors 1. Among the people of Miâo, they did not use the power of goodness, but the restraint of punishments. They made the five punishments engines of oppression 2, calling them the laws. They
5. The king said, 'Ho! come,. ye rulers of states and territories 3, I Will tell you how to make punishments a blessing. It is yours now to give repose to the people;--what should you be most concerned
'In (settling) the five cases of error there are evils (to be guarded against);--being warped by the influence of power, or by private grudge, or by female solicitation, or by bribes, or by applications. Any one of these things should be held equal to the crime (before the judges). Do you carefully examine, and prove yourselves equal to (every difficulty). 'When there are doubts as to the infliction of any of the five punishments, that infliction should be forborne. When there are doubts as to the
255:1 Khih Yû, as has been observed in the Introduction, p. 27, is the most ancient name mentioned in the Shû, and carries us back, according to the Chinese chronologists, nearly to the beginning of the twenty-seventh century B.C. P. Gaubil translates the characters which appear in the English text here as 'According to the teachings of ancient times' by 'Selon les anciens documents,' which is more than the Chinese text says.--It is remarkable that at the commencement of Chinese history, Chinese tradition placed a period of innocence, a season when order and virtue ruled in men's affairs. 255:2 I do not think it is intended to say here that 'the five punishments' were invented by the chiefs of the Miâo; but only that 257:1 Khung and Lî are nowhere met with in the previous parts of the Shû, nor in any other reliable documents of history, as officers of Shun. Ȝhâi Khăn and others would identify them with the Hsî and Ho of the Canon of Yâo, and hold those to have been descended from a Khung and a Lî, supposed to belong to the time of Shâo Hâo in the twenty-sixth century B.C. Whoever they were, the duty with which they were charged was remarkable. In the Narratives of the States (a book of the Kâu dynasty), we find a conversation on it, during the lifetime of Confucius, between king Khâo of Khû (B.C. 515-489) and one of his ministers, called Kwan Yî-fû. 'What is meant,' asked the king, 'by what is said in one of the Books of Kâu about Khung and Lî, that they really brought it about that there was no intercourse between heaven and earth? If they had not done so, would people have been able to ascend to heaven?' The minister replied that that was not the meaning at all, and gave his own view of it at great length, to the following effect.--Anciently, the people attended to the discharge of their duties to one another, and left the worship of spiritual beings--the seeking intercourse with them, and invoking and effecting their descent on earth--to the officers who were appointed for that purpose. In this way things proceeded with great regularity. The people minded their own affairs, and the spirits minded theirs. Tranquillity and prosperity were the consequence. But in the time of Shâo Hâo, through the lawlessness of Kîu-lî, a change took place. The people intruded into the functions of the regulators of the spirits and their worship. They abandoned their duties to their fellow men, and tried to bring down spirits from above. The spirits themselves, no longer kept in check and subjected to rule, made their appearance irregularly and disastrously. All was confusion and calamity, when Kwan Hsü (B.C. 2510-2433) took the case in hand. He appointed Khung, the Minister of the South, to the superintendency of heavenly things, to prescribe the laws for the Spirits, and Lî, the Minister of Fire, to the superintendency of earthly things, to prescribe the rules for the people. In this way both spirits and people were 258:2 Kâo-yâo. 260:1 Meaning all the princes of the same surname as himself. As he was a hundred years old, there might well be among them those who were really his sons and grandsons. 260:2 'The three virtues' are those of the Great Plan; those of correctness and straightforwardness,' of 'strong government,' and of 'mild government.' 260:3 'Meaning all the princes;--of the king's own and other surnames. 261:1 That is, the statements, with the evidence on both sides, whether incriminating or exculpating. They are called fivefold, as the case might have to be dealt with by one or other of 'the five punishments.' 261:2 That is, the offences of inadvertence. What should ensue on the adjudication of any case to be so ranked does not appear. It would be very leniently dealt with, and perhaps pardoned. In 'the Counsels of Yü,' Kâo-yâo says to Shun, 'You pardon inadvertent offences however great.' 262:1 Or solitary confinement in the case of a female.THE MARQUIS OF LÜ ON PUNISHMENTS.