Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 2.djvu/93

worth while to consider these theories briefly in detail, since evidently the question of China's military potentiality has absorbing interest for the world at large.

The reason habitually put forward by Western critics to account for China's failures and defects in administrative and fiscal problems is also placed first in this context, namely, peculation. There is ground to think, it is true, that the effects of corruption in China are exaggerated by foreign observers, and even that much of what they call corruption, not being recognised as such by the Chinese themselves, does not exercise a demoralising effect. But in the matter of military equipment and organisation corruption, though on a small scale, may have fatal consequences by affecting the supply of arms and ammunition. Little of that kind of defect was observable, however, either in the war of 1894-1895 or in the Chili campaign of 1900. The Chinese carried weapons of the best description, had an ample supply of ammunition, and were furnished with large reserve stores of warlike material, as was proved on the capture of the arsenals near Tientsin. It is true that at the battle of the Yalu in 1894—the only great naval engagement in the China-Japan war—many of the Chinese shells were said to have carried bursting-charges of sand, and others are reported to have had dummy fuses. But if such defects really existed, they do not appear to have contributed materially to the result of the