officials. A Chinese official is corrupt much as Lord
Chancellor Bacon was corrupt; and whether the Chancellor ought properly
to be called corrupt is still matter of controversy. Moreover, the
people have always had their remedy. When the recognised "squeeze" is
exceeded, they protest by riot. So that the Chinese system, in the most
unfavourable view, may be described as corruption tempered by anarchy.

And this system, it is admitted, still prevails after the Revolution.
Clearly, indeed, it cannot be extirpated until officials are properly
paid; and China is not in a position to pay for any reform while the
Powers are drawing away an enormous percentage of her resources by that
particular form of robbery called by diplomatists "indemnity." The new
officials, then, are "corrupt" as the old ones were; and they are
something more. They are Jacobins. Educated abroad, they are as full of
ideas as was Robespierre or St. Just; and their ideas are even more
divorced from sentiment and tradition. A foreign education seems to make
a cut right across a Chinaman's life. He returns with a new head; and
this head never gets into normal relations with his heart. That, I
believe, is the essence of Jacobinism, ideas working with enormous
rapidity and freedom unchecked by the fly-wheel of traditional feelings.
And it is Jacobinism that accounts for the extraordinary vigour of the
campaign against opium. Many Europeans still endeavour to maintain that
this campaign is not serious. But that is because Europeans simply
cannot conceive that any body of men should be in as deadly earnest
about a moral issue as are the representatives of Young China. The
anti-opium campaign is not only serious, it is ruthless. Smokers are
flogged and executed; poppy is rooted up; and farmers who resist are
shot down. The other day in Hunan, it is credibly reported, some seventy
farmers who had protested against the destruction of their crops were
locked into a temple and burnt alive. An old man of seventy-six, falsely
accused of growing poppy, was fined 500 dollars, and when he refused to
pay was flogged to death by the orders of a young official of
twenty-two. Stories of this kind come in from every part of the country;
and though this or that story may be untrue or exaggerated, there can be
no doubt about the general state of affairs. The officials are putting
down opium with a vigour and a determination which it is inconceivable
should ever be applied in t