ow any particular calling. He is not obliged to serve as a
soldier or sailor. There are no sumptuary laws, nor even any municipal
laws. Outside the penal code, which has been pronounced by competent
Western lawyers to be a very ably constructed instrument of government,
there is nothing at all in the way of law, civil law being altogether
absent as a state institution. Even the penal code is not too rigidly
enforced. So long as a man keeps clear of secret societies and remains a
decent and respectable member of his family and of his clan, he has very
little to fear from the officials. The old ballad of the husbandman,
which has come down to us from a very early date indeed, already hints
at some such satisfactory state of things. It runs thus:--

"Work, work,--from the rising sun
Till sunset comes and the day is done
I plough the sod,
And harrow the clod,
And meat and drink both come to me,--
Ah, what care I for the powers that be?"

Many petty offences which are often dealt with very harshly in England,
pass in China almost unnoticed. No shopkeeper or farmer would be fool
enough to charge a hungry man with stealing food, for the simple reason
that no magistrate would convict. It is the shopkeeper's or farmer's
business to see that such petty thefts cannot occur. Various other
points might be noticed; but we must get back to taxation, which is
really the _crux_ of the whole position.

All together the Chinese people may be said to be lightly taxed. There
is the land-tax, in money and in kind; a tax on salt; and various
_octroi_ and customs-duties, all of which are more or less fixed
quantities, so that the approximate amount which each province should
contribute to the central government is well known at Peking, just as it
is well known in each province what amounts, approximately speaking,
should be handed up by the various grades of territorial officials.

I have already stated that municipal government is unknown; consequently
there are no municipal rates to be paid, no water-rate, no poor-rate,
and not a cent for either sanitation or education. And so long as the
Imperial taxes are such as the people have grown accustomed to, they are
paid cheerfully, even if sometimes with difficulty, and nothing is said.

A curious instance of this conservative spirit in the Chinese people,
even when operating against their own interests, may be found in the tax
known as _likin_, against which foreig