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