s had become commercialized; whilst the outer regions
had sunk to depopulated graziers' lands. The Government, after the
collapse of the Rebellion, being greatly impoverished, had openly fallen
to balancing province against province and personality against
personality, hoping that by some means it would be able to regain its
prestige and a portion of its former wealth. Taking down the ledgers
containing the lists of provincial contributions, the mandarins of
Peking completely revised every schedule, redistributed every weight,
and saw to it that the matricular levies should fall in such a way as to
be crushing. The new taxation, _likin_, which, like the income-tax in
England, is in origin purely a war-tax, by gripping inter-provincial
commerce by the throat and rudely controlling it by the barrier-system,
was suddenly disclosed as a new and excellent way of making felt the
menaced sovereignty of the Manchus; and though the system was plainly a
two-edged weapon, the first edge to cut was the Imperial edge; that is
largely why for several decades after the Taipings China was relatively
quiet.

Time was also giving birth to another important development--important
in the sense that it was to prove finally decisive. It would have been
impossible for Peking, unless men of outstanding genius had been living,
to have foreseen that not only had the real bases of government now
become entirely economic control, but that the very moment that control
faltered the central government of China would openly and absolutely
cease to be any government at all. Modern commercialism, already
invading China at many points through the medium of the treaty-ports,
was a force which in the long run could not be denied. Every year that
passed tended to emphasize the fact that modern conditions were cutting
Peking more and more adrift from the real centres of power--the economic
centres which, with the single exception of Tientsin, lie from 800 to
1,500 miles away. It was these centres that were developing
revolutionary ideas--_i.e._, ideas at variance with the Socio-economic
principles on which the old Chinese commonwealth had been slowly built
up, and which foreign dynasties such as the Mongol and the Manchu had
never touched. The Government of the post-Taiping period still imagined
that by making their hands lie more heavily than ever on the people and
by tightening the taxation control--not by true creative work--they
could rehabilitate themse