The undesirability of exposing foreign merchants to the arbitrary and corrupt methods of Chinese Custom-house officials led to the formation of an international staff of officers, which works perfectly and gives universal satisfaction. On the other hand, the great native firms are most scrupulously honest in all their transactions, having discovered from experience that ‘honesty is the best policy,’ and European merchants can only praise their way of transacting business. It is, therefore, neither on entering nor leaving China that difficulties occur, whether for importation or exportation. The trouble arises in the transport between the open ports and the places of consignment or expedition; the principal grievance arises through the system of _likin_, or of inland Customs, whereby an arbitrary and variable scale of taxation is exacted on goods passing through towns or over the frontiers of the various provinces, or even at certain determined places on the highroads and rivers. This pernicious system is a great drawback to the expansion of European trade, and gives rise to endless bother and expense. ‘Let us suppose,’ said a gentleman, thoroughly acquainted with commerce in the Far East, at a meeting of the London Chamber of Commerce in 1898, ‘that a train going from London to Newcastle had to be stopped three or four times on the way, so that goods might be overhauled and examined by officials whose main object is to extort as much as they can in their own interests, and who value goods arbitrarily at sight. Imagine, for instance, a consignment of skins getting damaged by the rain through careless packing, and on being weighed found heavier than declared in the invoice: the result is, that the luckless owner is charged, not according to the increased weight, but _fined_ according to his personal property, say £50 or; £100 on £1,000! Or, finally, what would become of British trade if we had to put up with _likin_ officials, one of whom examines goods once in every three days, and another announces his intention of only doing so when ten trains have arrived?’ There is a remedy for the _likin_ system, and that is a ‘transit pass’; but more often than not, as with most things in China, this is merely a theoretical improvement. On payment of a sum equal to half the original entry duty, all imported goods should be considered free of inland duty. But this regulation does not work, and no one avails himself of it, since the Chinese very ingenuously manage to evade it by charging ‘a duty on arrival at destination,’ which comes to the same thing.