The encyclopædist Ma-twan-lin mentions the period between 627 and 649 A.D. as the last, during which the Government attempted to restore the old agrarian customs. It may be doubted whether the revival can have been actually carried out all over the empire, but the intention was to give every householder one lot of land for perpetual, and another, consisting of orchard, for temporary ownership, the last answering to the duty fields of the Souy. These lots as a rule were to consist of eighty and twenty mow respectively, and the repartition took place after the last of the crops were gathered in. The restrictions on sales, enforced by the Yuen Wei, were retained, but land might be pledged by an absentee owner, who had no natural representatives to occupy it for him, and a cultivator, desirous of migrating to another district, might sell his allotment and employ the purchase money in obtaining another elsewhere.

The limits on purchases were evaded by rich men who bought land in the name of agents or farmers, and the practice of sub-letting, which reached a considerable development under the Sung, seems to have originated at this time, as the reserves of State land became exhausted and the low official rent ceased to act as a check upon private owners. The fixity of tenure allowed by the State to its tenants contributed to this result, for land, let to one generation after another, came to be regarded as private property subject to land tax, which it resembled in all particulars except the original title.

It had formerly been a maxim of State that the land tax should be paid by the occupier, who was normally also the owner; but as the effect of the redistribution of lands at the beginning of the dynasty wore off, some of the cultivators fell again into poverty and the land tax into arrears. Yangjin, one of the innovating financiers, then hazarded the startling doctrine that it did not matter who paid the taxes provided enough was paid.1 He therefore introduced a new plan of taxing artisans and tradesmen, so as to make the personal tax of these classes as remunerative as the land tax. A great development of trade is said to have followed this measure, so we must suppose that previously the Government had put difficulties in the way of the cultivators leaving the land for other pursuits. The same principle served to justify the indulgence now extended to the rich proprietors who undertook to pay the personal taxes of their dependants, while taking their chance of evading the land tax altogether. The increase in the amount levied gave the landless poor an additional motive for accepting the protection thus offered, without regard to its probable ulterior results.

Taxation was on the whole much heavier than under the Hans. The demand for money payments in 766 A.D. was in itself burdensome, and when three years later this was commuted into a biennial grain payment, the proportion of the produce taken, in the case of the more fertile lands,

1 Arbeiten d. R. Ges., p. 20; Journ. As., 1838, p. 300.

was nearer 25 than 10 per cent. Another account describes the people as divided into three classes, each comprising three sections and paying a kind of graduated income tax ranging from 4,000 tsien in the highest of the first class to 500 in the lowest of the third class.1 The rate of payment is thus twenty times as much as that paid by an ordinary cultivator under the Hans; but the great falling off in the number of the taxpayers is the cause of the apparent increase.

Yang-jin, already quoted as maintaining that it did not matter who paid the taxes, gave, in the early years of Te-tsong (780 A.D.), the formal sanction of the exchequer to the feudalizing tendency of rich landowners, by taxing the estate as a whole, and making the landlord responsible for taxes levied on all the landless families settled under his protection. Free labourers with no fixed settlement or occupation were called "strangers ;" and as this class increased in numbers, the loss to the revenue, from the impossibility of taxing the migratory poor, became considerable.

The new measure, though taxing land which had previously escaped, was not unpopular with the rich, because it gave for the first time a kind of legal sanction to the system of "agglomeration;" and by allowing, so to speak, the lord of the manor to stand between the State and the cultivators, it sanctioned his usurpation of those imperial functions which had hitherto been sedulously guarded. The State, in fact, waived its right of determining what burdens should be imposed on the peasantry, in order to facilitate the collection of revenue, and the result was much the same as in the case of more deliberate attempts at farming the taxes. The new feudal chiefs used their power to make themselves independent of the Crown, the land tax became a sort of tribute, to be refused by those who were strong enough to do so with impunity, and the gradual decay of the imperial authority which led to the fall of the dynasty, was held to begin with this surrender of direct influence.

In somewhat the same way, though more legitimately, the revival of the village system was used as a means of increasing the corvées, which at this time formed a serious and unpopular burden. The payment required in lieu of personal services was three times as much as that paid for the duty fields, and instead of the three days' labour required by the Chow Li, it was regarded as a concession to demand only twenty-two days' labour in the year. Individual labourers apparently had succeeded in evading the demands on them, and the labour tax was therefore assessed upon the village as a whole, so that the local authorities were obliged in self-defence to force all the inhabitants to contribute. The central government was apt to transfer unpopular duties like this to the village authorities in other cases. Thus, for example, in 683 A.D., when the issue of counterfeit money was punished by death, the neighbours in towns and villages were made responsible for each other, so as to prevent tacit complicity.

As an encouragement to agriculture, newly reclaimed land was allowed to be held free of tax, and it is significant of the depressed state in which 1 Journ. As., lc., p. 299.

the cultivators found themselves, that this permission was followed by complaints that the old taxed land was being abandoned in favour of the free wastes. Several memorials were addressed to Tai-tsong, against the oppression caused by public works, and he was reminded of the full treasuries left by the deposed Souy Dynasty, to show how little a ruler is likely to gain by economies made at the expense of his subjects. Throughout the prosperous times of the dynasty, it seems to have been a standing source of surprise and disappointment to the more thoughtful politicians, that the common people were not as much better off as was to be expected from the aggrandizement of the empire; and the only explanation that presents itself is that the Government was more expensive as well as stronger than its predecessors.

The emperor Te-tsong (779-802 A.D.) is reported to have held a conversation with a peasant, whom he met, when incognito, on a hunting expedition, which explains why even the best days of the Tang Dynasty fail to rank among the golden ages of popular tradition. Instead of the lawful tribute collected twice a year from the cultivator, this rustic complains that he is burdened with all sorts of mysterious and additional charges. He has to deliver the grain at court himself, without being paid a better price than when the Government collected it, though he has either to hire animals to bring it or wear out his own on the journey; and when by any chance a favourable harvest might make amends for his losses, he is obliged to sell his surplus at the lowest price and buy it back again at the highest, the first time he is in want.1 In other words, the abuse which Ma-twan-lin describes under the name of "grain purchase by agreement" was rife at this time, and the so-called voluntary contract was forced on the helpless cultivators by the ever-growing army of tax collectors.

An apologue, by Lin-tsung-yuan (773-819), the philosophic defender of Buddhism against the diatribes of Han-wen-kung, represents the people as suffering quite as much from the indiscreet zeal of their rulers as from direct oppression. A certain market gardener is described as famous because everything he plants is sure to thrive, and bear fruit or flowers early and abundantly. He is asked to describe his method, and explains that it consists only in letting things alone, in not worrying the plants with watching or training, but allowing them to grow as nature prompts when they are once well planted in good soil. He is asked if these principles can be applied to government. "Ah," he replied, "I only understand nursery gardening; government is not my trade. Still, in the village where I live, the officials are for ever issuing all kinds of orders, as if greatly compassionating the people, though really to their utter injury. Morning and night the underlings come round and say, 'His honour bids

1 De Mailla, vi. p. 350. In the same reign it was complained of as a serious griev ance that an avaricious minister failed to provide the troops called out for a campaign with full rations, in addition to the pay reserved for the maintenance of their families. It was estimated that their ordinary pay was practically tripled during their time of active service. (Ib., p. 331.)

2 Herbert Giles, Gems of Chinese Literature, p. 148.

us urge on your ploughing, hasten your planting, and superintend your harvest. Do not delay with your spinning and weaving. Take care of your children. Rear poultry and pigs. Come together when the drum beats. Be ready at the sound of the rattle.' Thus are we poor people badgered from morn till eve. We have not a moment to ourselves. How could any one flourish or develop under such conditions?"

The fable, which is evidently by a disciple of Chuang-tze, has an 18th century sort of sound, which makes it difficult to realize that it comes to us from the age of Egbert, but there is at least no difficulty in understanding how even a well-meaning oriental Government at that date might overgovern and over-burden its subjects in the name of progress. Like the contemporary secularism of Han-yu, the fabulist's belief in free industry survives in modern China, less as a speculative opinion than as an organic habit of mind and manners.

There is a Chinese proverb: "When swords are rusty and spades bright, prisons empty and granaries full, the steps of the temples covered with mud and the courts of the tribunals filled with grass, doctors on foot and bakers on horseback, when old men and children abound, the empire is well governed." Except with regard to the frequentation of temples, the Tang Dynasty did not as a rule stand very high in its conformity to these tests. The whole period was one of increasing commercial activity rather than one of increasing industrial prosperity. Both industry and commerce were hampered by Government interference, which was at least as often as not of an interested kind, and, as we have seen, resulted in the conversion of some of the leading writers of the day to the doctrine of laissez faire in its most extreme form.

But some of the legislation was honestly meant to check the danger of excessive inequality in the distribution of wealth, to which the Government had always been alive; and even the clumsy restrictions on trade, in the supposed interest of the treasury, had at worst the same tendency. No country in the worid has really less to gain than China by foreign commerce, and, blunder for blunder, it is less unintelligent for a Government which distrusts the mercantile class to discourage trade by legislative restraints, than for those which intend to promote trade and manufactures to hamper both by would-be protective regulations, such as were universally believed in by European rulers till within the last century or two.

The Chinese method of utilizing experiments in the art "how not to do it" is in the main negative. When legislation of one sort has missed its aim or proved vexatious in fresh ways, the legislation is allowed to drop; it is not thought necessary to try a new plan at the risk of new inconveniences. The State learns what to let alone, and the people profit by their widening liberties to do for themselves what the Government had failed to do for them. The result is that industry and commerce are at the present moment more entirely left to themselves in China than in any other civilized country, with in the main satisfactory results. But it is only just to her earlier rulers to point out that this paradisaical state of

laissez faire was not reached by popular wisdom, in spite of State bungling, but under cover of legislation, wise and otherwise, yet, in the main, designed to compass the identical results which now commend themselves to public opinion in the Middle Kingdom. In other words, the experience of China proves that the industrial condition of a country may be permanently influenced by its legislation, when that legislation gives voice to powerful and deep-rooted national tendencies.