484 MILITARY REFORM
ity in the distribution of taxes and sweep away all the problems associated with
illegal and forced taxation of children, the aged, dead souls, and the neighbors
and relatives of runaways. What they failed to take into account, however, was
that difference, not equality, was a principle of nature and that differential and
discriminatory treatment of people was justified and proper: "It is in the nature
of material objects that they are not all alike, that they differ from one another
in ten thousand ways - the noble from the base, the thick from the thin, the large
from the small. the light from the heavy - and that everything is this way."
He then extended his concept of the pattern of nature and material objects by
affirming distinction and hierarchy as the basis of Confucian moral standards:
This [the existence of real differences among all things] was the reason why
the sage kings in governing the states of the world necessarily did so on the
basis of the inequality of the nature of things. They honored the noble and
treated the base with disdain, provided generous treatment for the deserving
and meager benefits for the undeserving; they did the same [in distinguishing
between] the great and small, important [heavy] and unimportant [light], seeing
to it that each should obtain his own place and not dare transgress his role [pun]
in life.
It might be possible that if such a nondiscriminatory household cloth tax were
adopted, court officials might willingly comply with it to aid their country in a
time of danger, hut "if you talk about the scholars who spend their whole lives in
arduous study, would it not indeed he grievous to make them pay the same cloth
tax as those who have never read a single word?25He justified his view with a classical attribution to Mencius, who he claimed
once rejected the idea that large and small straw sandals should be sold for the
same price. He was probably misquoting Mencius because the only statement
in the book of Mencius close to this citation is a reference to a scholar named
Lung. who once said that a sandal maker askcd to make shoes for people with-
out knowing their specific sizes would never make any as large as a basket; he
would make them all more or less Lhe same size '"because all men's feet are like
one another" (literally, "the feet of the world are the same"). The rest of this sec-
tion in thc Mencills, however, is not a defense of innate difference but thc oppo-
site -an assertion of the equal and uniform capacity of all men for moral principle
and righteous behavior. Mencius made his point by raising a problem that later
plagued the English empiricists: the seeming constancy and uniformity of per-
ceptions of material objects shared by all human beings. For Confucians, how-
ever, the problem was the human capacity for moral behavior, not the real existence
of objects nor the capacity to know of them. Mencius's point was that because
human beings appear to share not only the same perceptions of, but also tastes
and preferences for, the objects of the senses, the uniform capacity of human
minds for moral perfection should not be lacking. As Mencius stated in the sec-
tion preceding the remarks on shoes, "Thus all things which are the same in kind