ABSTRACT
If you have friends interested in history and political theory, you may safely ask them to guess who said this. Was it Cromwell? Was it Robespierre? Was it some extreme follower of Jefferson? Was it Lenin, or perhaps Hitler? These are some of the guesses likely to be made, but they are all completely wide of the mark. The author of this weighty observation on right and might was Tien Te, the leader of the Taiping rebellion in China, and the date is 1850. He was trying to dispossess the Manchu emperors, who were foreign conquerors, and in the meantime he was not above a little brigandage. ‘How’, he exclaimed, ‘have the Manchus, who are foreigners, a right to collect the revenues of eighteen provinces, while we, who are Chinese, are forbidden to take a little money from the public stock?’
