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
plainly a two-edged weapon, the first edge to cut was the Imperial
edge; that is largely why for several decades after the Taipings
China was relatively quiet.
Time was also giving birth to another important development--
important in the sense that it was to prove finally decisive. It
would have been impossible for Peking, unless men of outstanding
genius had been living, to have foreseen that not only had the
real bases of government now become entirely economic control, but
that the very moment that control faltered the central government
of China would openly and absolutely cease to be any government at
all.
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