Another method by which the bully signifies his dissatisfaction with his enemy, is by injuring his crops. In a country where the farms are subdivided into mere fragments, every farmer's land is contiguous to that of a great number of other persons. As already mentioned a large farm will often consist of scores of different pieces of ground, which have been bought as opportunity offered. When the land is planted, and again when the harvest is gathered, excellent opportunity is afforded for disputes. The little bushes which serve as boundaries of the fields of different owners, in regions where stone posts are too expensive, are readily destroyed or removed, and in any case the boundaries are more or less inexact, leaving room for uncertainty as to the precise point at which one piece of ground ends and another begins.
It is in such situations as this that the bully is at his best. It is well understood that _he_ will suffer no loss, and that whoever happens to be his neighbour, will literally have "a hard row to hoe." There are sometimes sections of ground, such as those belonging to public uses, river embankments, the land of certain temples, and the like, which no one but a bully could cultivate at all, because the crops must be defended against invasion from all quarters, and only a bully can furnish the necessary skill and ferocity to protect himself.
In his essay on Lord Clive, Macaulay mentions the circumstance which was still remembered in Shropshire, that in his boyish days the great Indian soldier "formed all the idle lads of the town into a kind of predatory army, and compelled the shopkeepers to submit to a tribute of apples and half-pence, in consideration of which he guaranteed the security of the windows." Young Robert Clive had hit upon the precise principle by which the Chinese bully maintains himself in perpetual rule, a principle indeed as old as the race:
"The good old rule, the simple plan That those should take who have the power, And those should keep who can."
The means of enforcing these exactions is always at hand, and is expressed in one fateful and compound noun, _law-suit_. The bully who understands his business is well acquainted with every one at the district yamên, and is in fact one of their best customers, or rather the man who brings them their custom. The yamên is the spider's web, and the bully is the large insect which drives the flies into the net, where it will go ill with them ere they escape.