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 themselves.

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