Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/158

classes whenever there was any provocation to do so. In the case of the foreigner, who came to the Chinese in the first instance simply and solely as a dealer in goods and as a medium of exchange, there was from the beginning a temptation to do this." Indeed, Chinese history shows that from the earliest times the tradesman was regarded, not as a useful and indispensable element of the body politic, but as a mischievous person who grew fat at his neighbour's expense and interfered to make life hard for the consumer. The founder of the Han dynasty interdicted the use of a silk garment or a carriage by merchants and taxed them heavily, with the definite object of rendering their calling unpopular, and in his era as well as subsequently no trader was eligible for official appointment. In those days, however, the military element ruled the situation, and, "as Mr. E. H. Parker well puts it, the chief subject for commercial speculation was grain for the armies, and the trader of the period seems to have been the same objectionable sort of person as the ubiquitous army-purveyor and commissary so detested by Napoleon during his Italian campaigns." It may be assumed that had militarism continued to be paramount in Chinese society as it was under the earlier dynasties, the merchant, remaining a despised individual, would have failed to develop the high qualities to which so many foreign observers have borne witness. Such, at all events, was the course that social