Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/196

174 in a breakdown which would leave him stranded. Moreover, he feared the result of this financial uncertainty on the morale of his men, particularly because the harassed and discontented populace might at any moment swell the rebel ranks. He therefore begged the imperial government to secure grants of money from Kwangtung and Ssuch'uan, together with 80,000 taels of silver from Kiangsi.

This brings out clearly the financial weakness of China. The practices of modern public finance were then far below the horizon in what was still essentially a mediaeval state. Any war that arose must pay its own way in whatever manner was possible. This great rebellion had already impoverished the treasuries of several fruitful and wealthy provinces to such an extent that they were failing to remit their allotted taxes to Peking. The coinage was debased; the large, well-made brass coins of K'anghsi and K'ienlung were giving place to the inferior coinage of Hsienfung and his successors who came into this heritage of poverty. Had the modern system of transferring the burden of war to another generation through the issue of government obligations been known at this time, and had the government been sufficiently centralised, it is fairly certain that the Taiping rebellion might have been crushed within a year after it gained headway. Tsêng Kuo-fan, as can be seen all through his dispatches, year after year, by constantly devising methods for squeezing out new taxes, managed with the utmost difficulty to get enough to maintain the small force that he dared to employ. Had there been a strong government with relatively unimpaired credit behind him, Tsêng could easily have gathered a force ten times as great as the one he did employ, and brought the T'ienwang to terms. For in Nanking the latter was already feeling the