The method of collection is a further check to greater income. The existing machinery of fiscal administration operates, roughly, as follows: When the funds begin to run short for the usual expense-accounts, the various executive boards apply to the Board of Revenue. The latter makes a glorified guess at the sum which, considering harvests, rebellions, and other elements, each province might be able to pay. It is thereupon put to the provincial officials, consisting usually of a viceroy, a governor, a treasurer, and a judge, to supply something approximating this sum. The provincial syndicate, through the medium of various intermediate officials, such as the _tao-tai_ and the _fu_-prefect, whose powers are nebulous and overlapping, call upon the eighty-odd county magistrates for an estimated share. The magistrates, _shien-kwan_, called colloquially “father and mother officials,” whose varied functions include rendering justice, keeping the jail, leading the religious processions, and collecting the taxes, send out each his hundred henchmen to get the actual money or grain. Of this hierarchy of officials not one has a salary which would keep his establishment going for a month. Of necessity the laborer must draw his own hire first from the harvest. Under such a satrap system, by the grace of human nature, each official takes what the traffic will bear, letting pass to the man higher up enough to conciliate his claim and to keep face with Peking. If the penalties which follow deficient generosity to a superior define the maximum contribution, the minimum is fixed by the famine or the rebellion point. With this method in vogue, it is not unreasonable to assume that the amounts gathered in the first instance are about as great as can be wrung from the people. An increase of the Government’s receipts would have to come through shaking down the office-holders for a larger share of their pickings. Such a revenue as a real reform would demand must despoil of vested rights in his livelihood every mandarin, viceroy, _tao-tai_, _fu_-prefect, magistrate, and petty publican in the empire. It might be practicable to commute the likin, or inland octroi dues, for fixed sums by agreement with the _hongs_, or merchant associations. This was done in Li Hung Chang’s province, Kwang-tung, where $2,750,000 was paid in order to get rid of likin dues which netted only $670,000. Enough might be raised by this means to pay the officials at just rates. Then honest collections might reasonably be demanded, and a beginning be made of fiscal reform. But it is apparent from these outlines how long a way China has to travel before her capacity for self-defense is a reality.