fighters. One was the sudden rise in the cost of living. The other was the steady increase of their number in the new home at Peking.

At the time the Manchu court moved from Mukden to Peking, the number of the Bannermen who accompanied it south was estimated at 80,000. Wherever the Manchu court went they went; for, as has been mentioned before, it was upon the Eight Banners that the power of the Manchu rested. The ease and luxury of Peking life—and not so many years of that either-translated the rugged warriors of the north into a race of courtiers with greed for graft and such easy-street habits as scandalized even the original masters of them, the Chinese. In the days of Emperor Shunchih and even in those of Kanghsi, the highly modern-and ancientdisease of H. C. L. was not much bother to the Manchu Bannermen. Even in gay Peking things were quite cheap. The allowance the Bannermen received from the freehanded court was quite ample to cover all their needs. But the piping days of Peace-which followed-had their own plague. Luxury climbed the stair that had no top step to it, and soon these Manchu Bannermen were toiling with their brows knitted, like so many New Yorkers of the golden present, over the problem of making ends meet.

At the time when the Manchu made their triumphal entry into Peking they found all about the palace a number of vast estates which the courtiers and princes of the Ming régime had abandoned in their flight out of the capital. The Manchu court confiscated them all, of course, and parceled them out to its own friends. A good deal of this real estate fell into the hands of the Bannermen. This was done to hold the Bannermen in certain specified localities near the palace, to keep them from scattering away in all directions, to keep them separate and distinct from the Chinese-which, by the by,

was a wise measure, preventing their getting into endless trouble with the natives-and to insure protection for the throne. The Bannermen were not allowed to move out of the specified localities. They were absolutely forbidden to follow a commercial activity of any kind; they were not allowed to intermarry with the Chinese. And by the ordinance issued in the seventh year of Emperor Shunchih, they were absolutely forbidden to sell their land-holdings.

But when men need money badly it usually makes them think. It actually forced the Manchu warriors to that rather effeminate and uncommon exercise. Out of their profound meditation they came up with a scheme of leasing called tienti. It was simply a long-term leasing and often ended in the loss of the property in a way with which we of the highly civilized present are thoroughly familiar. The loss of land happened to the Manchu Bannermen with almost monotonous regularity, as a matter of historic fact. The Bannermen type of Manchus came from herdsmen ancestors who loved to fold their tents quite as much as to pitch them beside singing brooks in pastures new. They were strangers to that land-hunger to which a farming race like the Chinese is heir. The loss of their lands weighed lightly upon them. It was a regular thing for a Manchu Bannerman to turn over his land to a Chinese tenant farmer, make him do the work, and get a certain percentage of the yield without lifting a finger. But once his land was leased, it was practically good-by for the Manchu.

There was another thing which drove the Bannermen into a bitter struggle. Their number increased scandalously in the kindly atmosphere of Peking. The 80,000 of the year 1644 increased to 120,000 toward the close of the seventeenth century, in the days of Emperor Kanghsi. What was particularly alarming was not so much the increase of the Bannermen themselves.

It was the increase of idlers and dependents in the families of the Manchu warriors. Only the eldest sons among them could succeed their fathers as Bannermen. The younger sons became so many parasites. The same thing happened to the members of the Manchu nobility. The aristocrats who moved into Peking with the first Emperor of the Taching Dynasty numbered about 2,000. That was quite a handsome crowd, as armies of parasites go, but they multiplied like flies.

PLANTING BANNERMEN IN MANCHURIA

Just what to do with the steadily increasing army of these idlers became one of the really big questions of the Manchu statesmen. Why not plant these superfluous Bannermen on the choice sections of Manchuria's productive fields? The Peking court acted upon it. In 1744 the Government picked 3,000 men out of the dependents and idlers in the families of the Eight Bannermen and sent them to two points in the Province of Kirin in Manchuria-the two sections in the upper reaches of the Sungari where the soil was fertile and had the advantage of the ready transportation facilities of the river. The paternal Manchu court at Peking was extremely kind to these sons of Bannermen. To every family commanded to depart for Kirin the Government gave a sum of money to prepare itself for the journey. All along the line of its travel back to its natal soil, the Government provided it with carts and horse-feed. As soon as the colonists reached the land provided for them, the Government gave them a certain amount of silver to start them in business; gave them a plot of land and a house to live in. The Government did not stop there. It gave them seeds and implements, even to the harness for the cattle to work the fields with, and looked after their needs to the smallest detail, that they