I made five more trips to Europe. In time I lost the financial support of
the National Science Foundation because my preliminary grant had
been made on the basis that I would concentrate on China. The admin-
istrators of the Foundation were quite sympathetic with my amended
proposal and willing to gamble on my work; but the reviewing panel
turned it down. Two panelists considered it presumptuous for someone
to say that in order to fully understand modern Chinese history one
must at first visualize what is missing in that country, yet before one
can canvas the records of Western Europe for an answer one must also
profess to know a lot about China. One of them charged me with
having abandoned the original purpose of my research, to which I had
no adequate defense.

Since my findings now form a part of this present book (the refer-
ences are again cited in the bibliography) there is no need to tell the
story in full here. But in brief, capitalism is a confusing and abused
word. In reality, as the world enters the modern era, most countries
under internal and external pressure need to reconstruct themselves by
substituting the mode of governance rooted in agrarian experience with
a new set of rules based on commerce. Since commercial distribution
focuses on exchange, all economic and social components within the
society must accordingly be made interchangeable before the law.

This is always easier said than done. The renewal process could
affect the top and bottom layers, and inevitably it is necessary to recon-
dition the institutional links between them. Comprehensive destruction
is often the order; and it may take decades to bring the work to com-
pletion. With few exceptions, the movement, mass in scale, starts with
ideological agitations but ends with an economic settlement. Egalitari-
anism, needed for stirring up the zeal and impetus of the movement, in
the end has to satisfy itself with no more than a pledge for equal
opportunity. A rational balance of the nascent and surviving social and
economic forces under a new set of laws is to be held supreme; it
marks the conclusion of the struggle.

Moral judgment on individuals is of doubtful value, and sometimes
it may obscure truth or mislead the search for it, because the primary
process under review is the working of a melting pot; in it the imperso-
nal factors must at first be given full recognition. In the early part of
the present century Maurice Ashley wrote a book entitled Oliver
Cromwell: The Conservative Dictator. His relentless indictment of the
Lord Protector went into great detail. But later he established himself

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