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 and local administrations, and in
replenishing a central treasury which no wealth could satisfy. The
Chinese phenomenon was therefore in no sense new; the dearth of coined
money and the variety of local standards made the methods used economic
necessities. The system was not in itself a bad system: its fatal
quality lay in its woodenness, its lack of adaptability, and in its
growing weakness in the face of foreign competition which it could never
understand. Foreign competition--that was the enemy destined to achieve
an overwhelming triumph and dash to ruins a hoary survival.