Peking has enjoyed no provincial remittances of taxes for some yeans, Whatever slight tendency to follow the precedent of Imperial days of making some account to the Central Government of taxes collected survived Yuan Shih-kai's collapse and death, was effectually wiped out by the loan orgies of 1917, 1918 and 1919. The proceeds of loans to an enormous total (which would how make up the bulk of the suggested consolidated debt) were to much more than sufficient for the Central Government, for the lavish expenditure upon the armed forces equipped and trained for the support of the Government, and for the personal enrichment of the whole official caste in the capital, that the provinces were not only allowed to retain local revenues as the price of nominal loyalty and in other cases as the price of silence, but were also given a share in the vast loot as a further inducement to active support. So in the stead of the old Imperial o tradition, there grew up in the provinces the conviction that by the nimble manipulation of high finance the Peking Government could always look out for itself and leave the provincial chiefs to farm their own bailiwicks for all they were worth, but there grew up the still more dangerous belief that Peking was habitually doing so well that those high functionaries who agreed to rusticate in provincial capitals were entitled to a commission.
For two years past the grass in the loan field has been getting painfully short. More and more ingenious devices have been, resorted to on holidays to meet the local bureaucratic expenses, to pay the local garrisons, and when possible to throw a sop to the provinces which were most threatening or which were supporting the particular clique in occupation of this ancient Tartar stronghold. For more than a year this has only through defaulting on existing obligations and now with the absolute exhaustion of foreign credit and the reduction of domestic credit to the vanishing point a job in Peking is worth little more to its holder than he can get out of it through the sale of offices or concessions, or through the misappropriation of the funds which should be devoted to the discharge of overdue obligations. As long as offices are saleable and as long as a few petty revenues trickle into Peking there will exist a class of officials ready to assume Ministerial posts in the same spirit that a fat merchant buys the right to collect likin imposts at a barrier, and to sacrifice ''face" and accept the opprobrium of a defaulter, just as the likin officer submits to the vilification of every traveller for the sake of the extort tions which he can wring from the timid.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.