43 Arthur Smith, one of the few Westerners to live in a Chinese village for any length of years, wrote: “It is a noteworthy fact that the government of China, while in theory more or less despotic, places no practical restrictions upon the right of free assemblage by the people for the consideration of their own affairs. The people of any village can, if they choose, meet every day of the year. There is no government censor present, and no restriction upon the liberty of debate. The people can say what they like, and the local Magistrate neither knows nor cares what is said.... But should insurrection break out, these popular rights might be extinguished in a moment, a fact of which all the people are perfectly well aware.” _Village Life in China_, New York, 1899, p. 228. This was written thirteen years before the fall of the Ch’ing dynasty. 44 J. S. Burgess, _The Guilds of Peking_, New York, 1928. This is perhaps the best work on the subject of the guilds which has yet appeared. The information was gathered by the students of the author, who as a teacher had excellent facilities for developing contacts. The students, as Chinese, were able to gather data from the conservative guild leaders in a manner and to a degree that no Westerner could have done. The classification here given is a modification of Burgess’. 45 S. Wells Williams, _The Middle Kingdom_, New York, 1895, p. 405. Dr. Williams, whose work is perhaps the most celebrated single work on China in the English language, wrote as follows concerning the nobility under the Ch’ing: “The titular nobility of the Empire, as a whole, is a body whose members are without power, land, wealth, office, or influence, in virtue of their honors; some of them are more or less hereditary, but the whole system has been so devised, and the designations so conferred, as to tickle the vanity of those who receive them, without granting them any real power. The titles are not derived from landed estates, but the rank is simply designated in addition to the name....” He also pointed out that, under the Ch’ing, the only hereditary titles of any significance were _Yen Shing Kung_ (for the descendant of Confucius) and _Hai Ching Kung_ (for the descendant of Kuo Hsing-hua, the formidable sea adventurer who drove the Dutch out of Taiwan and made himself master of that island).