Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/13



careful observers of world events believe that no calamity of the nineteenth century approached the Taiping rebellion in the total of misery and destruction. Several hundred district cities were taken and retaken, with looting and slaughter on both sides. Great cities became wildernesses; fruitful fields, deserts. Sanguinary battles and still more bloody massacres marked its progress. It threatened disruption to the empire and downfall to the emperor. In his Middle Kingdom, as late as 1882, S. W. Williams says of this group of insurgents:

That it was allowed to spread so far and wide was due to Chinese decentralisation and official incompetence; that the fanatical insurgents did not win was due to their lack of leadership from 1853 to 1858, and to the