linked commonwealths, called upon for matricular contributions in money and grain but otherwise left severely alone. [Footnote:  A very interesting proof—­and one that has never been properly 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.] The chain which bound provincial China to the metropolitan government was therefore in the last analysis finance and nothing but finance; and if the system broke down in 1911 it was because financial reform—­to discount the new forces of which the steam engine was the symbol—­had been attempted, like military reform, both too late and in the wrong way, and instead of strengthening, had vastly weakened the authority of the Throne.

In pursuance of the reform-plan which became popular after the Boxer Settlement had allowed the court to return to Peking from Hsianfu, the viceroys found their most essential prerogative, which was the control of the provincial purse, largely taken from them and handed over to Financial Commissioners who were directly responsible to the Peking Ministry of Finance, a Department which was attempting to replace the loose system of matricular contributions by the European system of a directly controlled taxation every penny of which would be shown in an annual Budget.  No doubt had time been vouchsafed, and had European help been enlisted on a large scale, this change could ultimately have been made successful.  But it was precisely time which was lacking; and the Manchus consequently paid the penalty which is always paid by those who delay until it is too late.  The old theories having been openly abandoned, it needed only the promise of a Parliament completely to destroy the dignity of the Son of Heaven, and to leave the viceroys as mere hostages in the hands of rebels.  A few short weeks of rebellion was sufficient in 1911 to cause the provinces to revert to their condition of the earlier centuries when they had been vast unfettered agricultural communities.  And once they had tasted the joys of this new independence, it was impossible to conceive of their becoming “obedient” again.