Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/23

Rh Bannermen with officers of the second grade under the governor. In Peking these Bannermen were under a special board of twenty-four tut'ung or lieutenant generals, each representing one of the twenty-four Banners, and subject to the Board of War.

The individuals composing the hereditary class from which this force was made up were further ranked into two classes, inner and outer, according to the relation they bore to the reigning family. The former were specially designated to service in the imperial and princely households, the latter were free to serve in the army or civil government outside. Practically every adult male Manchu was in some way enrolled under the Banners, either as a soldier or employee of the civil service. Every one enrolled in the superior three Banners received support whether he went into government service or not, while those in the inferior received stipends only when actually serving in the active or supernumerary ranks.

We are now able to realise the nature of the Manchu force. Around the capital and in the regions where danger might be expected, it formed the chief imperial reliance. There it still had some bravery and virtue to its credit. In the interior provinces it served chiefly as an independent garrison of the ruling race, under separate control, ready to forestall or oppose any sign of usurpation on the part of the viceroy or governor at his own capital, but without value for warfare. In such places the Bannermen were "practically honourable prisoners, rigidly confined within the limits of the city walls in the midst of a hostile population, speaking a dialect which Bannermen must learn in addition to their own if they wish even to purchase a cabbage in the streets; and the Tartar General, who nominally outranks the Chinese Viceroy, is often sneeringly regarded as an 'old frump' or a