which lasted ten years and is supposed to have destroyed the
unbelievable total of one hundred million persons. The empire,
torn by internecine warfare, surrendered many of its essential
prerogatives to foreigners, and by accepting the principle of
extraterritoriality prepared the road to ultimate collapse.

How in such circumstances was it possible to keep alive
absolutism? The answer is so curious that we must be explicit and
exhaustive.

The simple truth is that save during the period of vigour
immediately following each foreign conquest (such as the Mongol
conquest in the Thirteenth Century and the Manchu in the
Seventeenth) not only has there never been any absolutism properly
so-called in China, but that apart from the most meagre and
inefficient tax-collecting and some rough-and-ready policing in
and around the cities there has never been any true governing at
all save what the people did for themselves or what they demanded
of the officials as a protection against one another. Any one who
doubts these statements has no inkling of those facts which are
the crown as well as the foundation of the Chinese group-system,
and which must be patiently studied in the village-life of the
country to be fitly appreciated. To be quite frank, absolutism is
a myth coming down from the days of Kublai Khan when he so proudly
built his Khan-baligh (the Cambaluc of Marco Polo and the forebear
of modern Peking) and filled it with his troops who so soon
vanished like the snows of winter. An elaborate pretence, a
deliberate policy of make-believe, ever since those days invested
Imperial Edicts with a majesty which they have never really
possessed, the effacement of the sovereign during the Nineteenth