exposed--of the astoundingly rationalistic principles on which the
Chinese polity is founded is to be seen in the position of priesthoods
in China. Unlike every other civilization in the world, at no stage of
the development of the State has it been necessary for religion in China
to intervene between the rulers and the ruled, saving the people from
oppression. In Europe without the supernatural barrier of the Church,
the position of the common people in the Middle Ages would have been
intolerable, and life, and virtue totally unprotected. Buckle, in his
"History of Civilization," like other extreme radicals, has failed to
understand that established religions have paradoxically been most
valuable because of their vast secular powers, exercised under the mask
of spiritual authority. Without this ghostly restraint rulers would have
been so oppressive as to have destroyed their peoples. The two greatest
monuments to Chinese civilization, then consist of these twin facts;
first, that the Chinese have never had the need for such supernatural
restraints exercised by a privileged body, and secondly, that they are
absolutely without any feeling of class or caste--prince and pauper
meeting on terms of frank and humorous equality--the race thus being the
only pure and untinctured democracy the world has ever known.

[4] (a) This loan was the so-called 7 per cent. Silver loan of 1894 for
Shanghai Taels 10,000,000 negotiated by the Hongkong & Shanghai Bank. It
was followed in 1895 by a £3,000,000 Gold 6 per cent. Loan, then by two
more 6 per cent. loans for a million each in the same year, making a
total of £6,635,000 sterling for the bare war-expenses. The Japanese war
indemnity raised in three successive issues--from 1895 to 1898--of
£16,000,000 each, added £48,000,000. Thus the Korean imbroglio cost
China nearly 55 millions sterling. As the purchasing power of the
sovereign is eight times larger in China than in Europe, this debt
economically would mean 440 millions in England--say nearly double what