This tragic denouement did not fail to awaken within very few days among thinking minds a feeling of profound sympathy for the dead man coupled with sharp disgust for the part that foreigners had played—­not all, of course—­but a great number of them.  Briefly, when all the facts are properly grouped it can be said that Yuan Shih-kai was killed by his foreign friends—­by the sort of advice he has been consistently given in Constitutional Law, in Finance, in Politics, in Diplomacy.  It is easy to trace step by step the broad road he had been tempted to travel, and to see how at each turning-point the men who should have taught him how to be true and loyal to the Western things the country had nominally adhered to from the proclamation of the Republic, showed him how to be disloyal and untrue.  The tragedy is one which is bound to be deeply studied throughout the whole world when the facts are properly known and there is time to think about them, and if there is anything to-day left to poetic justice the West will know to whom to apportion the blame.

Yuan Shih-kai, the man, when he came out of retirement in 1911, was in many ways a wonderful Chinese:  he was a fount of energy and of a physical sturdiness rare in a country whose governing classes have hitherto been recruited from attenuated men, pale from study and the lotus life.  He had a certain task to which to put his hand, a huge task, indeed, since the reformation of four hundred millions was involved, yet one which was not beyond him if wisely advised.  He was an ignorant man in certain matters, but he had had much political experience and apparently possessed a marvellous aptitude for learning.  The people needed a leader to guide them through the great gateway of the West, to help them to acquire those jewels of wisdom and experience which are a common heritage.  An almost Elizabethan eagerness filled them, as if a New World they had never dreamed of had been suddenly discovered for them and lay open to their endeavours.  China, hitherto derided as a decaying land, had been born anew; and in single massive gesture had proclaimed that she, too, would belong to the elect and be governed accordingly.

What was the foreign response—­the official response?  In every transaction into which it was possible to import them, reaction and obscurantism were not only commonly employed but heartily recommended.  Not one trace of genuine statesmanship, not one flash of altruism, was ever seen save the American flash in the pan of 1913, when President Wilson refused to allow American participation in the great Reorganization Loan because he held that the terms on which it was to be granted infringed upon China’s sovereign rights.  Otherwise there was nothing but a tacit endorsement of the very policy which has been tearing the entrails out of Europe—­namely militarism.  That was the fine fruit which was offered to a hopeful nation—­something that would wither on the branch or poison the people as they plucked it.