Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/106

 thing—the steamer—and which was acclaimed as model and perfect when loans were secured on its receipts, because it made bondholders believe that their interest-coupons were in charge of an institution as solid and as permanent as the Bank of England.

Yet as a matter of fact the Maritime Customs has never touched Chinese life or economics in the slightest, nor has it greatly facilitated trade, which should be its chief function. True, it has enabled merchants to load and unload their cargoes on a water-front against a fixed tariff; but ten minutes beyond that waterfront barriers as high as mountains may and do exist,—with the markets irrevocably hidden behind them. To those who know that China's foreign trade still only amounts to four silver dollars per annum per head of population (the lowest percentage in the world for the greatest nation of small dealers that has ever existed) the Chinese Maritime Customs is a mere makeshift; a monument to the fierce fight which the maritime nations carried on in the early part of the nineteenth century regarding their inherent right to ports of entry along river and coast; a record of the fact that the Dying God—the Emperor—could not find officers to collect his duties during the great Taiping Rebel-