Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/107

 lion: a proof that the foreign consulates were honest enough to do it for him.

For at the same time that the Maritime Customs came into being as a quasi-foreign creation, the Taiping Rebellion and the loss of great revenues created likin, a system of petty levies carried out by means of barriers placed wherever trade passes, which because it accentuates provincialism undoes all the good the Maritime Customs should do with its fixed tariff. Until some Power does for all China what Prussia, in spite of her sins, once did for all Germany—that is, creates a Chinese Zollverein, or Customs Union, making absolute Free Trade within the territories of the Republic a fact—commerce in China will continue to be a medieval enterprise, inviting medieval diplomacy suitable to the courts of petty princes and amounting in the gross to little more than the trade of Switzerland.

SixeenSixteen [sic] years ago—to be exact, in 1902—England attempted to be that Power and in the Mackay Treaty, signed by Lord Inchcape in Shanghai, she agreed to a large tariff increase, abolishing likin in the famous Article VIII, on the strict understanding that the treaty was to be inoperative until all the Treaty Powers had signed identical instruments. In 1903, largely