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THE original strength of both China and Rome was that of superior peasant-agricultures. China preserved hers as her foundation almost to the present day. Rome abandoned hers as the source of social strength and stability, and in her fall left wide-spread desolation as the final monument of her methods.

   We will first take the unique story of the agricultural path of China through its forty centuries of existence. It has recently been admirably told in the English language by Dr. Mabel Ping-Hua Lee in The Economic History of China, with Special Reference to Agriculture, 1921, issued as Volume 99 of the Columbia University of New York's Studies in History.

   The agricultural history of China began in the remotest past some twenty centuries before that of Rome. It began with the creation by the Chinese sages of a practical unit of agriculture and social structure, which penetrated Chinese history as a practice and ideal up to modern times. This was known as the system of the Tsing Tien.

   Tsing Tien means the nine fields, made by the division of a large square into nine smaller squares. This was devised by the sages as the primary division of land.

   The eight outer squares were given to eight families for their individual use; the ninth or central square was reserved for the government and was worked in common by the same eight families.

   It was a device both of family individualism and co-operation. "The advantages of the system were thus enumerated: 1. Saving of expense; 2. Unifying of customs; 3. Improved production; 4. Easy exchange of commodities; 5. Mutual production; 6. Close social relations; 7. General co-operation."

   The measurements of the square fields were standardized, so that any area could be marked off without ridges or baulks and the loss of land they entail. Moreover, except for the buffalo to draw the plough, the donkey as a beast of burden, and the pig, which can live without pasture, few domestic animals were kept. The cultivation of animals, therefore, never became the rival of the cultivation of crops. "The subject of conversion into pasture lands may be wholly left out of consideration in a study of the history of Chinese land conditions."

   Fields vary in fertility, even those in close conjunction. This was well known to the Chinese with their minute local knowledge of their land, so local modifications of the principle were made. So also by adoption of children and the standardized measurement of land, adjustments were made to balance large and small families.

   The system included a payment of one ninth to government. This may be compared to the division in the Laws of Manu, Book 7, 130-2, and Book118, in which it is stated that the King shall take one sixth, one eighth or one twelfth of the crops, and one sixth of the other produce. Significantly, at times of urgency, he could take one fourth.

   "The whole history of the government administration of agriculture in China coincides with the history of the Tsing Tien system," writes Dr. Ping-Hua Lee. "Its vicissitudes, its crises and its epochs were timed by the abolition or reestablishment of the system . . . . It is fortunate for the economic historian that the Tsing Tien system is coincident with China's political history."

   Chinese history is then of the simplest. At times of peace the system and its partners, the peasant-proprietors, flourished. At times of great government urgency the system waned or was even temporarily abolished.

   The history of the Chinese has been singularly, though by no means entirely, peaceful. Their wide dominion came to them largely owing to the attraction which their superior civilization had upon other peoples. "They have none of the characteristics of a warlike race, and their triumphs over less cultivated peoples have been gained rather by peaceful advance than by force of arms." (Sir Robert Douglas, China.) The cause of this peacefulness was undoubtedly their excellent cultivation and their continued preservation of the fertility of the soil. They did not become land-hungry as did the Romans.

   Chinese agriculture is credited with beginning forty-six centuries ago. In the reign of Emperor Yao (2357-2261 B.C.),--we return to Dr. Ping-Hua Lee--"the making of canals, connecting the ditches in the fields with the rivers, and the deepening of the rivers for the purposes of drainage, inaugurated the immense systems of canals found in present-day China."

   The Emperor Yao was followed by the "Golden Age" of Chinese history. Here is may be said that a golden age is so common in the traditions of many peoples that one may conjecture that it may one day be found by research that it had a material basis in a widespread period of excellent agriculture. There is already evidence of this. Mr. O. F. Cook, of the U.S.A. Department of Agriculture, began a remarkable article in the National Geographic Magazine of May, 1916, with these words: "Agriculture is not a lost art, but must be reckoned as one of those which reached a remarkable development in the remote past and afterwards declined. The system of the ancient Peruvians enabled them to support large populations in places where modern farmers would be helpless." Sir William Ramsay, in the November number of 1922 of the same magazine, brought forward similar evidence of a wonderful agriculture in ancient Asia Minor; Professor Vavilov, of the University of Leningrad has established the remarkable ancient agriculture of Afghanistan and North-western India; Sir William Willcocks has championed the existence of an ancient Bengal agriculture comparable to that of the China of the Emperor Yao; and the list could be greatly extended. There is certainly evidence of the reality of a Golden Age. It can be thought of as a great agricultural period, and in the main free from the wars, migrations and civil disturbances which take their origin in a hunger for land and its products.

   No country is left to the uninterrupted enjoyment of a golden age. In the history of China, as well as that of India and Europe, a chief disturbing factor has been the aridity of the continental lands mainly lying to the north of the great desert belt of the Gobi, Lopnoor, Taklamaken, Kisyl-Kum, the Persian and Arabian deserts.

   It is not possible here to enter into the causes of aridity; to debate as to how much was due to climate and how much due to the destruction of forests by fire and axe by pastoral peoples and those that practice shifting cultivation. The effect of droughts occurring in arid countries can, however, be graphically realized by a recent calculation made in the arid regions of New South Wales, Australia. A rainfall of 20 inches upon a square mile of land will keep 600 sheep; one of 13 inches reduces the number to 100; one of 1 inch to but ten sheep. In dry periods the resulting starvation of pastoral peoples living upon their flocks can only be avoided by migrating to food-giving areas.

   The pastoral peoples and peoples of shifting cultivation in Mongolia to the north of the Gobi Desert were the section of the arid peoples who had the chief and most continued effect upon the history of China. They appear as the invaders of her territory under the name of the Hun-yu about four centuries before the Emperor Yaw, and they included the Manchus, whose dynasty came to an end in A.D. 1911. They were in general called the Tartars by Chinese historians.

   The Chow dynasty (1122-256 B.C.) saw the maturity of the Tsing Tien system, with the land and its taxation apportioned to careful estimations of soil fertility and the working capacity of the family, to which each portion of the land was allotted.

   The later period of the Chow dynasty, from 659 B.C., was one of nominal authority. The empire was broken up into the "Warring States," some of which had Tartar dynasties from the west and north. One of the seven principal states was that of Chin. In 350 B.C. the Duke of Chin created Shang Yang his minister of state. Shang Yang saw that in Chin land was plentiful but the population was scarce. He adopted two methods to improve and enrich the state. He regulated the rivers and by irrigation made the land safer for agriculture, and then he invited farmers from more crowded states to migrate to Chin. To tempt them he allowed them to take up as much land as they could cultivate, regardless of the Tsing Tien system; in other words he abolished that system and gave the land as private property to those who were willing to cultivate it. Having established agriculture by means of the new settlers, he freed the native men of Chin from work upon the fields and made them into an organized army. "Within a period of several years the state became rich and the army strong." Chin became the strongest of the Warring States.

   About a century later Chen, to become known as Chin Chi Huangti, meaning the first Chin Emperor (246-202 B.C.), became the duke of Chin. He used his army to such effect that he reunited China.

   Impressed by the results of the land system of Shang Yang, Chin Chi Huangti abolished the Tsing Tien system throughout the empire, and land was made private property to be bought and sold freely. This enabled him to collect peasants who had lost their land and set them to work on the stupendous achievement by which he is chiefly known, the building of the Great Wall of China to shut out the Tartars. The wall extended along the frontier for fifteen hundred miles. He also followed Shang Yang in instituting irrigation works; he built roads; he erected a magnificent capital; in short, upon the capital of the labour which he had forced from the fields, he erected public works on an immense scale. His was the first great departure from the Tsing Tien system.

   But before the end of his reign this fevered capitalization had eaten up much of the real wealth of the people. A contemporary recorded that the people became so impoverished that "the men worked hard on the farms, but were unable to get enough to eat. Girls spinning could not get enough to wear. Therefore the people became dissatisfied with the Chin dynasty."

   Upon the death of this masterful emperor, rebellion broke out, his son was slain, and the Han dynasty (202 B.C.-- A.D. 220) was established. Then ensued a long struggle between the large landowners who opposed and the imperial ministers who desired the restoration of the Tsing Tien system. "Tung Chung Shoo, in his petition for the limitation of landholdings, reveals to us the condition of the poor. They were so reduced that they lost all their holdings to the rich, so that it was a common saying of the day--'that whereas the land of the rich extended from fields to fields, the poor had not enough to accommodate the point of an awl.' Landlords, being given a free hand, rents went as high as fifty per cent of the produce."

   In these critical times it seemed as if China would be permanently forced off, the first agricultural path on to the second, that of capitalistic farming. The fate of the peasantry hung in the balance. The struggle was severe; the soil, lacking its accustomed tendence, degraded with the peasants and much of it went to waste; great numbers of the peasants died of starvation. At one time, continues Dr. Ping-Hua Lee, it was "estimated that only 20 to 30 per cent were left. This reduction of population was itself a remedy, for there was land, left ownerless, which could be given to the poor and to returning wanderers . . . . Every encouragement was given to agriculture by the extension of irrigation; the poor were relieved through tax exemptions and provided with lands, seeds and food. Even land belonging to the ruling house and attached to its imperial ancestral temples were thrown open to cultivation." By these efforts of an administration inspired "to govern the country, not with the interests of the few, but with the necessities of the many," the peasant-family cultivation was restored. A period of grandeur followed, in which all the provinces south of the Yangtze River joined those to the north, and the empire itself was extended over Mongolia and westward to the Caspian Sea, at the time when Rome had attained the widest extent of her dominion. Parthia alone separated the two empires.

   The Han dynasty came to an end and was followed by a long period (A.D. 220-590) of divided states and partial conquests by Tartars. The Tang dynasty (A.D. 618-905) restored the unity and the fame of China. It was followed by the Sung dynasty (A.D. 960-1276). Both dynasties supported the Tsing Tien system against the rich who had "eaten up" the land in the long period of divided states. Emperor after Emperor strove to check and reduce the large estates of the wealthy. Their efforts succeeded when fertility gave prosperity, and the fields, worked in common for the government, supplied the needed revenue. But when drought, flood, imperial expense in combatting the Tartars or due to extravagance, degraded the soil, the opportunities for the rich to take over the lands of the poor recurred. Both dynasties, after centuries of fame and prosperity, came to an end at times of increase of the large estates and corresponding distress amongst the peasants.

   So the inner history of China continued, fluctuating according to the fertility of the soil and the adherence of the government to the principles of the sages.

   The next rulers of China were Tartars, the great conqueror, Jenghiz Khan and his descendants. Both they and their predecessors in Northern China, the Kin, were vigorous people; both were profoundly impressed with the principles of the Chinese civilization; both reorganized agriculture on the model of the Tsing Tien system.

   The Chinese Ming (1368-1643), who expelled them when their original vigour had decayed, were at first the champions of the Tsing Tien system. Later, before the end of their dynasty, they and their officials became corrupt, levied supertaxes for their own benefit upon the peasants and despoiled the land. The Ming were overthrown by a small body of Tartars from Manchuria, who constituted the last dynasty of China, that of the Manchus (1644-1912).

   The Manchus modelled themselves upon Chinese methods, to which they gave their northern energy. "Within sixty years from the beginning of their dynasty, they had restored prosperity and contentment to the realm."

   They restored the cultivation of the land by peasant families, but they did not restore the payment of revenue from the central field. The Ming had introduced other taxes, poll tax and super-taxes. The Manchu imposed a single fixed tax upon land, at one time said to have been only one twentieth of the gross product. It was paid partly in kind and partly in silver.

   As their dynasty continued, the fame of China in Europe increased. Marco Polo had already sung the praises of the Chinese, their politeness, their cheerfulness, their use of every part of their land, and their beautiful cities such as Hangchow, which other travellers also acclaimed as the loveliest and greatest in the world.

   It was the wealth of these cities that most attracted the merchants and sailors of Europe. The land route across Asia being blocked by the Turks, the sea route was discovered. On their part, the Chinese had no desire to trade. Their vast and rich country gave them all they needed; their civilization was complete; they desired no change. But the day of intrusion into their self-sufficiency came. In 1516, a Portuguese trading vessel sailed up the river to Canton and startled its inhabitants with a salute of guns. The influence of the western traders had begun. Later came the enforced opening of certain ports, the establishment of embassies in Peking, and the permission for foreigners to travel in any part of the empire.

   Wars and quarrels with Europeans led to the exaction of indemnities to be paid in money, and, after the Taiping rebellion in 1860, all Chinese taxes, including the tax on the land of the family cultivators, had to be paid in silver and not in produce. The unique agricultural path of China, embodied in the Tsing Tien system, came to an end.

   Such, in brief outline, is the story of the most aged dominion of the earth. Other empires rose and sank; she alone survived. And one reason of her survival was that, throughout her long history, she preserved as a principle, sometimes strained to the breaking point, the partnership of the. peasants and soil which her sages systematized.

   We now turn to the story of the Roman agricultural path, which failed to preserve the peasantry, through whose strength and superior agriculture Rome originally rose to greatness.