are present must be left to those who know China well and are responsible for her future progress.  If these conditions are all present then I have no doubt that the change of the form of the government will be for the benefit of China.

The first illuminating point, as we have already said, to leap up and lock attention to the exclusion of everything else in this memorandum, is that the chief difficulty which perplexes Dr. Goodnow is not the consolidation of a new government which had been recognized by all the Treaty Powers only two years previously but the question of succession to the supreme office in the land, a point which had already been fully provided for in the one chapter of the Permanent Constitution which had been legally passed prior to the Coup d’etat of the 4th November, 1913.  But Yuan Shih-kai’s first care after that coup d’etat had been to promulgate with the assistance of Dr. Goodnow and others, a bogus Law, resting on no other sanction than his personal volition, with an elaborate flummery about three candidates whose names were to be deposited in the gold box in the Stone House in the gardens of the Palace.  Therefore since the provisional nature of this prestidigitation had always been clear, the learned doctor’s only solution is to recommend the overthrow of the government; the restoration of the Empire under the name of Constitutional Monarchy; and, by means of a fresh plot to do in China what all Europe has long been on the point of abandoning, namely, to substitute Family rule for National rule.

Now had these suggestions been gravely made in any country but China by a person officially employed it is difficult to know what would have happened.  Even in China had an Englishman published or caused to be published—­especially after the repeated statements Yuan Shih-kai had given out that any attempt to force the sceptre on him would cause him to leave the country and end his days abroad[17]—­that Englishman, we say, would have been liable under the Orders in Council to summary imprisonment, the possibility of tumult and widespread internal disturbances being sufficient to force a British Court to take action.  What are the forces which brought an American to say things which an Englishman would not dare to say—­that in 1915 there was a sanction for a fresh revolutionary movement in China?  First, an interpretation of history so superficial, combined with such an amazing suppression of contemporary political thought, that it is difficult to believe that the requirements of the country were taken in the least bit seriously; secondly, in the comparisons made between China and the Latin republics, a deliberate scouting of the all-important racial factor; and, lastly, a total ignorance of the intellectual qualities which are by far the most outstanding feature of Chinese civilization.