364 PROBLEMS OF HUMAN EVOLUTION 



English dependencies. Our system in India obliges us to 

 support the money-lender through thick and thin. We dream 

 of a system under which the poor ryot shall borrow at an easy 

 rate from the state. It does not occur to us to leave the usurer 

 to get his interest and his capital if he can. 



Trade The difficulties of trade suggest to each district that it had 

 better produce most of the commodities that it requires for 

 itself: better still, if a man's own farm can give him nearly 

 all he wants. There are local custom houses where the 

 officials condescend to the use of fraudulent weights and 

 measures. You cannot take your goods to market without 

 squabbles and unfair exactions on the way. 1 Besides these 

 local custom houses, there are the likin barriers to impede 

 free circulation. The likin dues are collected for imperial 

 defence : whenever goods are conveyed from one district to 

 another they must pay toll, and the field for venality and 

 corruption is a glorious one. The whole system is abomin- 

 able, and yet it tends to prevent evils which European civilisa- 

 tion has to face and remedy. A man must stick to his land 

 and till it himself, and then he is free from most of the 

 evils that Chinese misgovernment allows. The whole world 

 of official corruption can do little then to interfere with his 

 happiness. And thus peasant proprietorship is encouraged 

 even by the miserable incompetency and mismanagement of the 

 government. 



Religion Religion is decadent: superstition seems to be the proper 

 name for what remains. If, as Mr Benjamin Kidd has taught 

 us, religion is the power that binds human society together, 

 why has not disintegration begun in China ? It is not quite 

 certain that disintegration is not beginning. But things move 

 slowly there. The tendency of all the institutions is to cement 

 and not to dissolve. The very tolerance by government 

 of abuses prevents decay of the national life. Each family 

 becomes to a great extent self-dependent. The necessity of 

 honesty to social life becomes apparent to the large majority 

 because the government does little to enforce honest dealing. 



1 John Chinaman, p. 137. 



