Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/68



writer can lay claim to an intimate knowledge of the Far East and of everything that affects it. Almost his earliest memory of childhood is of a great crowd of many thousands of shouting men, stripped to the waist, and armed with bamboo carriers' poles, who had swarmed forward determined to destroy the house of his father because five square black characters on the door-plate proclaimed that it was the official residence of a commissioner—one responsible for the levying of taxes. The salt-tax had just been raised, to pay for the Tonkin war of 1884; and these men, coming on shore from the great fleet of salt-junks which were tied up along miles of the Yangtsze River, were trying to secure a remission by intimidation. Characteristically, they were threatening the wrong authority; but long experience had taught them that in a country of compromises violence of any sort is effective as a political argument, and that it