lves.

It would take too long, and would weary the indulgence of the reader to
establish in a conclusive manner this thesis which had long been a
subject of inquiry on the part of political students. Chinese society,
being essentially a society organized on a credit-co-operative system,
so nicely adjusted that money, either coined or fiduciary, was not
wanted save for the petty daily purchases of the people, any system
which boldly clutched the financial establishments undertaking the
movement of _sycee_ (silver) from province to province for the
settlement of trade-balances, was bound to be effective so long as those
financial establishments remained unshaken.

The best known establishments, united in the great group known as the
Shansi Bankers, being the government bankers, undertook not only all the
remittances of surpluses to Peking, but controlled by an intricate
pass-book system the perquisites of almost every office-holder in the
empire. No sooner did an official, under the system which had grown up,
receive a provincial appointment than there hastened to him a
confidential clerk of one of these accommodating houses, who in the name
of his employers advanced all the sums necessary for the payment of the
official's post, and then proceeded with him to his province so that
moiety by moiety, as taxation flowed in, advances could be paid off and
the equilibrium re-established. A very intimate and far-reaching
connection thus existed between provincial money-interests and the
official classes. The practical work of governing China was the
balancing of tax-books and native bankers' accounts. Even the
"melting-houses," where _sycee_ was "standardized" for provincial use,
were the joint enterprises of officials and merchants; bargaining
governing every transaction; and only when a violent break occurred in
the machinery, owing to famine or rebellion, did any other force than
money intervene.

There was nothing exceptional in these practices, in the use of which
the old Chinese empire was merely following the precedent of the Roman
Empire. The vast polity that was formed before the time of Christ by the
military and commercial expansion of Rome in the Mediterranean Basin,
and among the wild tribes of Northern Europe, depended very largely on
the genius of Italian financiers and tax-collectors to whom the revenues
were either directly "farmed," or who "assisted" precisely after the
Chinese method in financing officials