Long ago patriotic Chinese gave up hope in the Manchu government and realized that China’s salvation lay in the taking over of the management of affairs into their own hands.  For over a decade Dr. Sun Yat-sen and other Chinese of courage and ability, mostly those with a Western education, have been busily engaged in secretly preaching revolutionary doctrines among their fellow countrymen and preparing for a general outbreak.  They collected numerous followers and a large sum of money.  The revolutionary propaganda was being spread country-wide, among the gentry and soldiers, and even among enlightened government officials, in spite of governmental persecution and strict vigilance.  Revolutionary literature was being widely circulated, notwithstanding the rigid official censorship.

Added to all this are the ever important economic causes.  Famines and floods in recent years have greatly intensified the already strong feeling of discontent and unrest, and served to pile up more fuel for the general conflagration.

In short, the whole nation was like a forest of dry leaves which needed but a single fire spark to make it blaze.  Hence, when the revolution broke out on the memorable 10th of October, 1911, at Wu-Chang, it spread like a forest fire.  Within the short period of two weeks fourteen of the eighteen provinces of China proper joined in the movement one after another with amazing rapidity.  Everywhere people welcomed the advent of the revolutionary army as the drought-stricken would rejoice at the coming rain, or the hungry at the sight of food.  The great wave of democratic sentiment which had swept over Europe, America, and the islands of Japan at last reached the Chinese shore, and is now rolling along resistlessly over the immense empire toward its final goal—­a world-wide democracy.

A STEP TOWARD WORLD PEACE

THE UNITED STATES ARBITRATION TREATIES A.D. 1912

HON.  WILLIAM H. TAFT

Later generations will doubtless note, as one of the main manifestations of our present age, its progress in international arbitration, in the substitution of justice for force as the means of deciding disputes between nations.  On March 7, 1912, the United States Senate, after months of argument, finally agreed to ratify two arbitration treaties which President Taft had arranged with England and France.  True, the Senate, before thus establishing the treaties, struck out their most far-reaching article, an agreement that every disagreement whatsoever should be referred to a Joint High Commission.  Without this clause the treaties still leave a bare possibility of warfare over questions of “national honor” or “national policy”; but practically they put an end to war forever as between the United States and its two great historic rivals.