That he can do, and in the great majority of cases actually does perform, such remarkable financial legerdemain is a fact that is entirely due to the vicious system on which the whole civil service in China is based. It is perfectly understood by the Government that when a mandarin is appointed to any official position under it, the squeezes he has to pay for it, and the inadequate salary he will receive for his services, are all to be met and supplemented by what he can wring out of the people. This system is as old as the nation, and has become so inwrought and worked into its very fibre, that a new creation of national life would seem to be essential before it could be eradicated from the body politic. When the mandarin arrives at his Yamen, which is his residence and the place where all the official business of the county is transacted, he is met by the whole staff of men who are to assist him in the arduous duties that fall to him as the chief magistrate in the large district he has been appointed to rule. These consist of a private secretary, an interpreter, a number of writers who write dispatches and conduct any correspondence that may arise, a large body of policemen, or runners as they are generally called in the East, and a dozen disreputable-looking men who form the retinue of the mandarin, when he is called out to settle disturbances in any part of his large field, or adjudicate on cases that have to be tried on the spot. Nominally he is responsible for all the salaries that this great crowd of men receive, and one wonders how he manages to pay them all out of his three hundred a year. The real fact of the case is, the only man that receives any salary from him is his private secretary. All the rest purchase the privilege of being employed in his service, and give the whole of their time free simply for being permitted to extract out of the people who come to engage in lawsuits, or from those who have fallen within the grip of the law, fees and squeezes and perquisites enough to give them a very good permanent income. It is very interesting to watch the way in which these gentry carry on their official work, and how as ministers of justice in executing the decisions of the mandarin their one aim seems to be to extract as much out of the pockets of the people they are operating on as it is possible for them to do. A farmer, for example, comes one day into the Yamen to lay a complaint against a rich neighbour who has taken forcible possession of some of his fields. He produces the deeds of his lands, and shows how they have been in his family for several generations and that they have never been alienated either by sale or by mortgage. The rich man has simply taken forcible possession of them because he belongs to a formidable clan, he declares, and not because he has any right to the fields.