the effect of this regionalism has been such that up to very
recent times the Central Government has been almost as much a
foreign government in the eyes of many provinces as the government
of Japan. Money alone formed the bond of union; so long as
questions of taxation were not involved, Peking was as far removed
from daily life as the planet Mars.

As we are now able to see very clearly, fifty years ago--that is
at the time of the Taiping Rebellion--the old power and spell of
the National Capital as a military centre had really vanished.
Though in ancient days horsemen armed with bows and lances could
sweep like a tornado over the land, levelling everything save the
walled cities, in the Nineteenth Century such methods had become
impossible. Mongolia and Manchuria had also ceased to be
inexhaustible reservoirs of warlike men; the more adjacent
portions had become commercialized; whilst the outer regions had
sunk to depopulated graziers' lands. The Government, after the
collapse of the Rebellion, being greatly impoverished, had openly
fallen to balancing province against province and personality
against personality, hoping that by some means it would be able to
regain its prestige and a portion of its former wealth. Taking
down the ledgers containing the lists of provincial contributions,
the mandarins of Peking completely revised every schedule,
redistributed every weight, and saw to it that the matricular
levies should fall in such a way as to be crushing. The new
taxation, likin, which, like the income-tax in England, is in
origin purely a war-tax, by gripping inter-provincial commerce by
the throat and rudely controlling it by the barrier-system, was
suddenly disclosed as a new and excellent way of making felt the
menaced sovereignty of the Manchus; and though the system was