Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/63

are the provincial treasurer and the provincial judge. The treasurer was at one time the chief official in a province, but nearly five hundred years ago it became the custom to send eunuchs or other court functionaries on "soothing circuit" and gradually these officers became a permanent institution, so that the modern name for a governor is "circuit- soother." The official relation of the treasurer to the judge is not more intimate than that of the vice- roy to the governor yet the names of the four are usually found together on memorials to the throne with regard to appointments and promotions, the viceroy and the governor presenting and endorsing recommendations made by the treasurer and the judge. Without attempting to set up any clear and uniformly observed distinction between the official spheres of these four functionaries, they may be concisely described as forming the executive, consultative, and, in a measure, the judicial and legislative body of each province; in a word, its government.

For it may truly be said that each province is an independent state so far as its corporate existence is concerned. It has its own army, its own fiscal system, and its own manners and customs. For naval and commercial purposes as well as for foreign affairs there is a more or less general connection. This is especially true of foreign affairs. The pressure exercised upon China by the outer world in modern times has corrected something of the looseness of her political structure, and has compacted her eighteen provinces into two groups;