Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/390

Rh twenty thousand men, but by the middle of 1864, when Nanking was captured, some fifty thousand served under his banner. With all the income that he could secure by contributions from various provinces and from his own vice-regal domain, not to mention the sums realised from the sale of honors and patents to official rank, his entire account for the eleven years ending with the fall of Nanking only approximated 21,300,000 taels! Here we have a clue to understanding why it required so long to crush this movement.

If we are tempted to regard the work of Tsêng as being too dilatory, as showing too much prudence and caution where dash and energy would seem to have been required, the above-named embarrassments must not be ignored. Nor can we pass over the patent fact that the regulars proved to be utterly useless in this war, and that without the militia the rebellion could not have been suppressed at all. If, then, Tsêng could bring the latter into action only in small groups of a few thousand each, because he lacked the means to secure scores of thousands, and if in addition we recall the fact that the rebels readily enrolled hundreds of thousands of the riffraff of China lusting after loot, we are not justly entitled to lay the fault at Tsêng's door. It was one of the defects of Chinese government which could not be remedied by anyone caught in the system. He had the thankless task of discovering funds for armies as well as of winning victories, and these funds had to be secured often against the will of officials who thought they had better claims to the same funds; and besides jealous confrères, he had to overcome the red tape and vested interests of officialdom until his end was finally gained.

Other exigencies that Tsêng had to face and overcome were: (1) His own lack of military training. He was a civil official and an accomplished scholar — never a