as a soldier or sailor.  There are no sumptuary laws, nor even any municipal laws.  Outside the penal code, which has been pronounced by competent Western lawyers to be a very ably constructed instrument of government, there is nothing at all in the way of law, civil law being altogether absent as a state institution.  Even the penal code is not too rigidly enforced.  So long as a man keeps clear of secret societies and remains a decent and respectable member of his family and of his clan, he has very little to fear from the officials.  The old ballad of the husbandman, which has come down to us from a very early date indeed, already hints at some such satisfactory state of things.  It runs thus:—­

  “Work, work,—­from the rising sun
   Till sunset comes and the day is done
       I plough the sod,
       And harrow the clod,
   And meat and drink both come to me,—­
   Ah, what care I for the powers that be?”

Many petty offences which are often dealt with very harshly in England, pass in China almost unnoticed.  No shopkeeper or farmer would be fool enough to charge a hungry man with stealing food, for the simple reason that no magistrate would convict.  It is the shopkeeper’s or farmer’s business to see that such petty thefts cannot occur.  Various other points might be noticed; but we must get back to taxation, which is really the crux of the whole position.

All together the Chinese people may be said to be lightly taxed.  There is the land-tax, in money and in kind; a tax on salt; and various octroi and customs-duties, all of which are more or less fixed quantities, so that the approximate amount which each province should contribute to the central government is well known at Peking, just as it is well known in each province what amounts, approximately speaking, should be handed up by the various grades of territorial officials.

I have already stated that municipal government is unknown; consequently there are no municipal rates to be paid, no water-rate, no poor-rate, and not a cent for either sanitation or education.  And so long as the Imperial taxes are such as the people have grown accustomed to, they are paid cheerfully, even if sometimes with difficulty, and nothing is said.

A curious instance of this conservative spirit in the Chinese people, even when operating against their own interests, may be found in the tax known as likin, against which foreign governments have struggled so long in vain.  This tax, originally one-tenth per cent on all sales, was voluntarily imposed upon themselves by the people, among whom it was at first very popular, with a view of making up the deficiency in the land-tax of China caused by the T’ai-p’ing Rebellion and subsequent troubles.  It was to be set apart for military purposes only,—­hence its common name “war-tax,”—­and was alleged by the Tsung-li Yamen to be adopted merely as a temporary measure.  Yet, though forty years have elapsed, it still continues to be collected as if it were one of the fundamental taxes of the Empire, and the objections to it are raised, not by the people of China, but by foreign merchants with whose trade it interferes.