many wives and children, he announced constantly that he had entirely dropped out of the political life of China and only desired to be left in peace.  There is reason to believe, however, that his henchmen continually reported to him the true state of affairs, and bade him bide his time.  Certain it is that the firing of the first shots on the Yangtsze found him alert and issuing private orders to his followers.  It was inevitable that he should have been recalled to office—­and actually within one hundred hours of the first news of the outbreak the Court sent for him urgently and ungraciously.

From the 14th October, 1911, when he was appointed by Imperial Edict Viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan and ordered to proceed at once to the front to quell the insurrection, until the 1st November, when he was given virtually Supreme Power as President of the Grand Council in place of Prince Ching, a whole volume is required to discuss adequately the maze of questions involved.  For the purposes of this account, however, the matter can be dismissed very briefly in this way.  Welcoming the opportunity which had at last come and determined once for all to settle matters decisively, so far as he was personally concerned, Yuan Shih-kai deliberately followed the policy of holding back and delaying everything until the very incapacity marking both sides—­the Revolutionists quite as much as the Manchus—­forced him, as man of action and man of diplomacy, to be acclaimed the sole mediator and saviour of the nation.

The detailed course of the Revolution, and the peculiar manner in which Yuan Shih-kai allowed events rather than men to assert their mastery has often been related and need not long detain us.  It is generally conceded that in spite of the bravery of the raw revolutionary levies, their capacity was entirely unequal to the trump card Yuan Shih-kai held all the while in his hand—­the six fully-equipped Divisions of Field Troops he himself had organized as Tientsin Viceroy.  It was a portion of this field-force which captured and destroyed the chief revolutionary base in the triple city of Hankow, Hanyang and Wuchang in November, 1911, and which he held back just as it was about to give the coup de grace by crossing the river in force and sweeping the last remnants of the revolutionary army to perdition.  Thus it is correct to declare that had he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the revolution entirely before the end of 1911; but he was sufficiently astute to see that the problem he had to solve was not merely military but moral as well.  The Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint.  Their civilization had been made almost bankrupt owing to unresisted foreign aggression and to the native inability to cope with the mass of accumulated wrongs which a superimposed and exhausted feudalism—­the Manchu system—­had brought about.  Yuan Shih-kai knew that the Boxers had been theoretically correct in selecting as they first did the watchword