The effect of Liang Ch’i-chao’s appeal was noticeable at once:  there were ominous mutterings among all the great class of “intellectuals” who form such a remarkable element throughout the country.  Nevertheless there were no overt acts attempted against the authority of Peking.  Although literary and liberal China was now thoroughly convinced that the usurpation which Yuan Shih-kai proposed to practise would be a national disgrace and lead to far-reaching complications, this force were too scattered and too much under the power of the military to tender at once any active opposition as would have been the case in Western countries.  Yuan Shih-kai, measuring this situation very accurately, and aware that he could easily become an object of popular detestation if the people followed the lead of the scholars, decided to place himself outside and beyond the controversy by throwing the entire responsibility on the Tsan Cheng Yuan, the puppet Senate he had erected in place of the parliament destroyed by his coup d’etat of the 4th November, 1913.  In a message issued to that body on the 6th September, 1915, he declared that although in his opinion the time was inappropriate for making any change in the form of State, the matter demanded the most careful and serious consideration which he had no doubt would be given to it.  If a change of so momentous a character as was now being publicly advocated were decided in too great a haste it might create grave complications:  therefore the opinion of the nation should be consulted by the method of the ballot.  And with this nunc dimittis he officially washed his hands of a plot in which he had been the prime mover.

The Senate now openly delivered itself over to the accomplishment of the scheme which had been broached by Yang Tu, the monarchist pamphleteer.  Although this individual still posed as the leader of the movement, in reality he was nothing but the tool of a remarkable man, one Liang Shih-yi, famous throughout the country as the most unscrupulous and adroit politician the Revolution had thrown up.  This person, who is known to have been gravely implicated in many assassinations, and who was the instrument used in 1912 by Yuan Shih-kai to persuade the Manchu Imperial Family to abdicate, had in a brief four years accumulated a vast fortune by the manipulations he had indulged in as Director-General of The Bank of Communications, an institution which, because it disposed of all the railway receipts, was always in funds even when the Central Treasury itself was empty.  By making himself financially indispensable to Yuan Shih-kai he had become recognized as the power behind the Throne; for although, owing to foreign clamour, he had been dismissed from his old office of Chief Secretary to the President (which he had utilized to effect the sale of offices far and wide) he was a daily visitor to the Presidential Palace and his creatures daily pulled all the numerous strings.