continued to act as a Parliament and to regard themselves as the sole source of constitutional government.  After these various illegalities, the military autocrats were still compelled to deal with one of their number, who, in July, effected a five days’ restoration of the Manchu Emperor.  The President resigned, and was succeeded by a person more agreeable to the militarists, who have henceforth governed in the North, sometimes without a Parliament, sometimes with a subservient unconstitutional Northern Parliament.  Then at last they were free to declare war.  It was thus that China entered the war for democracy and against militarism.

Of course China helped little, if at all, towards the winning of the war, but that was not what the Allies expected of her.  The objects of the European Allies are disclosed in the French Note quoted above.  We wished to confiscate German property in China, to expel Germans living in China, and to prevent, as far as possible, the revival of German trade in China after the war.  The confiscation of German property was duly carried out—­not only public property, but private property also, so that the Germans in China were suddenly reduced to beggary.  Owing to the claims on shipping, the expulsion of the Germans had to wait till after the Armistice.  They were sent home through the Tropics in overcrowded ships, sometimes with only 24 hours’ notice; no degree of hardship was sufficient to secure exemption.  The British authorities insisted on expelling delicate pregnant women, whom they officially knew to be very likely to die on the voyage.  All this was done after the Armistice, for the sake of British trade.  The kindly Chinese often took upon themselves to hide Germans, in hard cases, from the merciless persecution of the Allies; otherwise, the miseries inflicted would have been much greater.

The confiscation of private property during the war and by the Treaty of Versailles was a new departure, showing that on this point all the belligerents agreed with the Bolsheviks.  Dr. Reid places side by side two statements, one by President Wilson when asking Congress to agree to the Declaration of War:  “We shall, I feel confident, conduct our operations as belligerents without passion, and ourselves observe with proud punctilio the principles of right and fairplay we profess to be fighting for”; the other by Senator Hitchcock, when the war was over, after a day spent with President Wilson in learning the case for ratification of the Versailles Treaty:  “Through the Treaty, we will yet get very much of importance....  In violation of all international law and treaties we have made disposition of a billion dollars of German-owned properly here.  The Treaty validates all that."[77] The European Allies secured very similar advantages from inducing China to enter the war for righteousness.

We have seen what England and France gained by the Chinese declaration of war.  What Japan gained was somewhat different.