as a soldier; and in order to keep up a breed of cavalry horses, every
family was compelled to take charge of one, which was provided, together
with its food, by the government. There was a system under which money
payments were substituted for the old-fashioned and vexatious method
of carrying on public works by drafts of forced labourers; and again
another under which warehouses for bartering and hypothecating goods
were established all over the empire.

Of all his innovations the most interesting was that all land was to be
remeasured and an attempt made to secure a more equitable incidence of
taxation. The plan was to divide up the land into equal squares, and to
levy taxes in proportion to the fertility of each. This scheme proved
for various reasons to be unworkable; and the bitter opposition with
which, like all his other measures of reform, it was received by
his opponents, did not conduce to success. Finally, he abolished all
restrictions upon the export of copper, the result being that even the
current copper "cash" were melted down and made into articles for sale
and exportation. A panic ensued, which Wang met by the simple expedient
of doubling the value of each cash. He attempted to reform the
examination system, requiring from the candidate not so much graces of
style as a wide acquaintance with practical subjects. "Accordingly,"
says one Chinese author, "even the pupils at the village schools
threw away their text-books of rhetoric, and began to study primers of
history, geography, and political economy"--a striking anticipation of
the movement in vogue to-day. "I have myself been," he tells us, "an
omnivorous reader of books of all kinds, even, for example, of ancient
medical and botanical works. I have, moreover, dipped into treatises on
agriculture and on needlework, all of which I have found very profitable
in aiding me to seize the great scheme of the Canon itself." But
like many other great men, he was in advance of his age. He fell into