The plan suggested is for each province to send in a separate petition, the draft of which will be made in Peking and wired to the respective provinces in due course.  If you approve, you will insert your name as well as those of the gentry and merchants of the province who agree to the draft.  These petitions are to be presented one by one to the Legislative Chamber, as soon as it is convoked.  At all events, the change in the form of the State will have to be effected under the colour of carrying out the people’s will.

As leading members of political and military bodies, we should wait till the opportune moment arrives when we will give collateral support to the movement.  Details of the plan will be made known to you from time to time.

This method of circular telegrams, which had been inherited from the last days of the Manchus, and vastly extended during the post-revolutionary period, was now to be used to the very utmost in indoctrinating the provinces with the idea that not only was the Republic doomed but that prompt steps must be taken to erect the Constitutional Monarchy by use of fictitious legal machinery so that it should not be said that the whole enterprise was a mere plot.  Accordingly, on the 10th September, as a sequel to the telegram we have just quoted, an enormous circular message of several thousand words was sent in code from Peking to all the Military and Civil Governors in the provinces instructing them precisely how to act in order to throw a cloak over the nefarious deed.  After explaining the so-called “Law on the General Convention of the Citizens’ Representatives” (i.e. national referendum) the following illuminating sentences occur which require no comment showing as they do what apt pupils reactionary Chinese are in the matter of ballot-fraud.

... (1) The fact that no fewer than one hundred petitions for a change in the form of State have been received from people residing in all parts of the country shows that the people are of one mind concerning this matter.  Hence the words in the “General Convention Law”:  “to be decided by the General Convention of the Citizens’ Representatives,” refer to nothing more than the formal approval of the Convention and are by no means intended to give room for discussion of any kind.  Indeed, it was never intended that the citizens should have any choice between a republic and a monarchy.  For this reason at the time of voting all the representatives must be made unanimously to advocate a change of the Republic into a Monarchy.

It behooves you, therefore, prior to the election and voting, privately to search for such persons as are willing to express the people’s will in the sense above indicated.  You will also make the necessary arrangements beforehand, and devise every means to have such persons elected,