dissatisfied with the wisdom or the power of the tipao and the village conclave. A murder is committed, and the friends of the victim will be satisfied with nothing short of the blood of the murderer; a water-course, which serves the purpose of irrigating two farms, has been diverted to the advantage of one of the householders, and the injured farmer cannot get the reparation which he demands; or crops have been pilfered, and the sufferer cannot obtain his due. In all such cases, if the wrong is proved, the tipao comes in for a share of the punishment inflicted on the offender. He is flogged with more or less severity for the obvious lapse in his administration which has made such things possible, and in cases of grave import he is liable to dismissal from his post.

The object of the tipao is, therefore, so to exercise his authority as to prevent petitions being presented to the mandarins. In this he has the full support of the village elders, who are quite alive to the fact that that neighbourhood is fortunate which has no history. It was said by Mencius that villagers who left unheeded domestic disturbances in their neighbours' households, were to be considered as participators in the quarrels. The elders of a district, acting on this dictum, do not scruple to enter on the scenes of family broils, and to constitute themselves judges of the matters in dispute. The village or district forms one whole, and each individual in it is but a cog-wheel in the social machine. He must work with the rest, or the whole machine will get out of gear. Personality disappears, and ostracism of a complete and oppressive kind is the fate of those who venture to oppose

themselves to the public opinion of those about them. Armed with the authority derived from this condition of popular sentiment, the village elders adjust disputes of a civil nature. They settle questions of trespass, they arrange money disputes, and they grant divorces to husbands impatient of the failings of their wives. It is seldom that in such cases their decisions are not final. Frequently, however, they overstep the limits which surround civil causes, and usurp to themselves the functions of criminal judges. In this way a large proportion of criminal business never reaches the courts of the mandarins, but is adjudicated upon by the village elders, with the consent and approval of the inhabitants. Occasionally appeals are carried to public functionaries against the judgments thus given, and the magistrates, as in duty bound, express their surprise and horror that such an irregular procedure should have been followed. But this is only one of pretty Fanny's ways. It is perfectly well known to every mandarin in the empire that a vast amount of business which should fall on his shoulders is borne by his unofficial colleagues, and he is quite content that it should be so. He only bargains that, in case of necessity, he may be free to disown them and all their works.

A case of this nature was lately reported to the throne by the Viceroy of Yun-nan. That officer stated that a native of a prefecture within his jurisdiction, named Pêng, when on his way to watch over his own patch of ground, passed through a field of corn farmed by a neighbour, and in an idle moment plucked some ears of corn. On the watchman employed on the farm giving the alarm,

I

Pêng fled, but not before he was recognized. The farmer, on hearing of the pilfering, consulted with his landlord, and agreed with him that Pêng should be made to suffer the usual penalty of his crime, and be burnt to death. According to custom a meeting of the village elders was summoned, and the case was laid before them. After considerable discussion it was determined that the supreme punishment should be inflicted, and Pêng was, therefore, bound and placed upon the funeral pyre. In order to prevent his mother, who had pleaded in vain for his life, from reporting the matter to the mandarins, she was compelled, under threats of instant death, both to sign a paper consenting to the deed, and to set the torch to the wood which was to consume her son. In an agony of horror at the part she had been made to play, the wretched woman went straight from the execution ground to the Yamun where she presented a petition against the murderers. Upon this the magistrate arrested the farmer and his landlord, and finding that by a law, enacted in 1750, the principal offenders in a concerted murder of such a kind should suffer the capital penalty, passed sentence accordingly. The landlord, however, having died in prison, it remained only to proceed against the farmer who was beheaded in due course.

In this and similar cases we have plainly a survival of the primitive village system, and of the power which was vested in the council of elders. Like so many of our own land laws, the unwritten rules regulating the village communities, and which still regulate the affairs of each village, are the growth of centuries of custom. The tipao and elders rule

because the people find it to their advantage that they should do so, and each individual generally submits himself to their authority because he is part of an organization, and finds it difficult to act independently of his neighbours. It is a system which is entirely apart from the legal code, each moves on its own plane, and it is only when the planes touch, that is, when an appeal, as in the above-mentioned case, is made to the authorites, that the two systems clash.

It often happens that one family becomes the possessor of an entire village, and then we have such names as Chang chia chwang, "the village of the Chang family;" Li chia chwang, "the village of the Li family," and so on. In such cases the seniors of the clan act as the village elders. In larger communities the clans claim jurisdiction over their members, irrespective of the authority of the tipao and his council. The clan seniors, however, devote their attention more exclusively to the intimate personal relationships of their members than do the village elders, their object being rather to prevent scandals within their ranks than to preserve public order. In this direction they have been found useful fellow-workers with the promoters of attacks upon Christians, and in the provinces of Hunan and Hupeh they jealously guard their ranks from the imputation of heresy. Any member who is suspected of having joined the foreign religion is hailed before the clan tribunal, and is flogged or otherwise tortured in proportion to his obduracy.

CHAPTER VI.

THE LITERATI AND FARMERS.

Of the four classes into which the people of China are traditionally divided, the first is that of literati or scholars. These are those who, having graduated at the Examination Halls, are waiting in the often forlorn hope of obtaining official appointments. They have certain privileges attaching to their order, and are generally recognized by the mandarins as brevet members of their own rank. They have, under certain conditions, the right of entrée into the presence of the local officials, and the law forbids that they should be punished or tortured until they have been stripped of their degrees by an imperial edict. As it would be beneath the dignity of a graduate to take to trade, and as there are many thousands more of them than there are places for them to fill-it was lately reckoned that there were 21,168 unemployed provincial graduates—the country is burdened with an idle population who are too proud to work, but who are not ashamed to live the life of hangers-on to the skirts of those who are better off than themselves.

As a rule they are poor men, and the temptation to enrich themselves by means of illegal exactions is often too strong for the resistance of their feeble