Appointment to office was at first by selection, followed by an examination to test proficiency; later was introduced the system of public competitive literary examinations for office, fully organized in the seventeenth century, and abolished in 1903, when official positions were thrown open to the graduates of colleges established on a modern basis.
In 1912, on the overthrow of the Manchu monarchy, China became a republic, with an elected President, and a Parliament consisting of a Senate and House of Representatives. The various government departments were reorganized on Western lines, and a large number of new offices instituted. Up to the present year the Law of the Constitution, owing to political dissension between the North and the South, has not been put into force.
Chinese law, like primitive law generally, was not instituted in order to ensure justice between man and man; its object was to enforce subordination of the ruled to the ruler. The laws were punitive and vindictive rather than reformatory or remedial, criminal rather than civil. Punishments were cruel: branding, cutting off the nose, the legs at the knees, castration, and death, the latter not necessarily, or indeed ordinarily, for taking life. They included in some cases punishment of the family, the clan, and the neighbours of the offender. The _lex talionis_ was in full force.
Nevertheless, in spite of the harsh nature of the punishments, possibly adapted, more or less, to a harsh state of society, though the "proper end of punishments"--to "make an end of punishing"--was missed, the Chinese evolved a series of excellent legal codes. This series began with the revision of King Mu's _Punishments_ in 950 B.C., the first regular code being issued in 650 B.C., and ended with the well-known _Ta Ch'ing lü li_ (_Laws and Statutes of the Great Ch'ing Dynasty_), issued in A.D. 1647. Of these codes the great exemplar was the _Law Classic_ drawn up by Li K'uei (_Li K'uei fa ching_), a statesman in the service of the first ruler of the Wei State, in the fourth century B.C. The _Ta Ch'ing lü li_ has been highly praised by competent judges. Originally it sanctioned only two kinds of punishment, death and flogging, but others were in use, and the barbarous _ling ch'ih_, 'lingering death' or 'slicing to pieces,' invented about A.D. 1000 and abolished in 1905, was inflicted for high treason, parricide, on women who killed their husbands, and murderers of three persons of one family. In fact, until some first-hand knowledge of Western systems and procedure was obtained, the vindictive as opposed to the reformatory idea of punishments continued to obtain in China down to quite recent years, and has not yet entirely disappeared. Though the crueller forms of punishment had been legally abolished, they continued to be used in many parts. Having been joint judge at Chinese trials at which, in spite of my protests, prisoners were hung up by their thumbs and made to kneel on chains in order to extort confession (without which no accused person could be punished), I can testify that the true meaning of the "proper end of punishments" had no more entered into the Chinese mind at the close of the monarchical _régime_ than it had 4000 years before.