on the best of terms with Lung Yu, began well; one of his first acts was to assure President Taft, who had written entreating him to expedite reforms as making for the true interests of China, that he was determined to pursue that policy.  Among those who had suggested reforms to Tzu Hsi, often going far beyond her wishes or plans, but who steadily supported her in all she did in that direction, the leading man was Yuan Shih-kai; with the possible exception of Chang Chih-tung, the Viceroy of Hunan and Hupeh, mentioned above, Yuan Shih-kai had become the greatest man in China, and even as he had advised and supported Tzu Hsi, so he advised and supported Prince Chun at the commencement of the Regency.  But the prince had received an unfortunate legacy from his brother, the Emperor Kuang Hsu, who, believing that Yuan Shih-kai had betrayed him to Tzu Hsi at the time of the coup d’etat, had given instructions to Prince Chun that if he came into power he was to punish Yuan for his treachery.  At the beginning of 1909 the Regent dismissed Yuan on an apparently trivial pretext, but every one in China knew the real reason for his fall, and not a few wondered that his life had been spared.  It is idle to surmise what might have happened if his services had been retained by the Throne all the time, but who could have imagined that so swift and almost incredible an instance of time’s revenges was in store—­that within barely three years Yuan Shih-kai would be the acknowledged head of the State, and Prince Chun and all the Manchus in the dust?

Representative government of a kind started in 1909 with the establishment of provincial assemblies; elections were held, and assemblies met in most of the provinces.  In the following year a senate or imperial assembly was decreed by an imperial edict; its first session was held in Peking in October of that year, and was opened by the Regent; one of the first things the assembly did was to memorialize the Throne for the rapid hastening on of reforms, and in response an edict was issued announcing the formation of a national parliament, consisting of an Upper and a Lower House, within three years.  Under further pressure the Throne in May of 1911 abolished the Grand Council and the Grand Secretariat, and created a Cabinet of Ministers, after the Western model.  But the agitation continued and went on growing in intensity; still it sought nothing apparently but a development of the constitution, and at least on the surface was neither anti-dynastic nor republican.

An anti-dynastic outburst at Changsha, Hunan, in 1910, was easily suppressed, and certainly gave no indication of what was so soon to take place.  So late as September of 1911 a rising on a considerable scale in the province of Szechuan was not antidynastic, but was declared by the rebels themselves to be directed against the railway policy of the Government.  The best hope for China lies in a wide building of railways; the Chinese do not object to them, but, on