tribesmen in each. Each family in the Hoshun is bound by the Chinese authorities to provide one recruit and four horses to these banner corps, and the khans are responsible to the Chinese Tartar generals for the formation of these corps, which are then placed under the command of Chinese banners-men, and are used as frontier guards and urban police in the Chinese towns outside the Great Wall. Thus a feudal system of tribute by service was in operation in Mongolia till the recent revolution, and the future of the system is undetermined at the moment of writing.
4. THE NATIVES OF MONGOLIA
The Mongols are a branch of an Asiatic race which presents many ethnological features common also to the Turks and Tartars farther to the west, and the Manchus and Tunguses farther to the east. Once politically united in a great Mongol Empire, they have been scattered and crushed under the domination of China, and their princes reduced to tributary vassals of Peking. Society is feudal and very similar to what it must once have been in the Middle Ages in England. The hereditary khans in Mongolia, descended from the sons and generals of the great Mongol emperor of the thirteenth century, have absolute power of life and death over their subjects, whom they hold down in a condition of feudal serfdom. Besides being bound to recruit the Chinese banner corps, the khans are responsible for yearly tribute to the Chinese Tartar generals. This tribute is arbitrary and oppressive and is levied both in silver and in kind. Professor Soboleff mentions instances from personal observation of tribute levied by the khans on their
