This precious document, which had no more legality behind it as a governing instrument than a private letter, can be studied by the curious in the appendix where it is given in full:  here it is sufficient to say that no such hocuspocus had ever been previously indulged in China.  Drafted by an American legal adviser, Dr. Goodnow, who was later to earn unenviable international notoriety as the endorser of the monarchy scheme, it erected what it was pleased to call the Presidential System; that is, it placed all power directly in the hands of the President, giving him a single Secretary of State after the American model and reducing Cabinet Ministers to mere Department Chiefs who received their instructions from the State Department but had no real voice in the actual government.  A new provincial system was likewise invented for the provinces, the Tutuhs or Governors of the Revolutionary period being turned into Chiang Chun or Military Officials on the Manchu model and provincial control absolutely centralized in their hands, whilst the Provincial Assemblies established under the former dynasty were summarily abolished.  The worship at the Temple of Heaven was also re-established and so was the official worship of Confucius—­both Imperialistic measures—­whilst a brand-new ceremony, the worship of the two titulary Military Gods, was ordered so as to inculcate military virtue!  It was laid down that in the worship of Heaven the President would wear the robes of the Dukes of the Chow dynasty, B.C. 1112, a novel and interesting republican experiment.  Excerpts from two Mandates which belong to these days throw a flood of light on the kind of reasoning which was held to justify these developments.  The first declares: 

...  “In a Republic the Sovereign Power is vested in the people, and the main principle is that all things should be determined in accordance with the desires of the majority.  These desires may be embraced by two words, namely, existence and happiness.  I, the President, came from my farm because I was unable to bear the eternal sufferings of the innocent people.  I assumed office and tried vainly to soothe the violent feelings.  The greatest evil nowadays is the misunderstanding of true principles.  The Republicans on the pretext of public interest try to attain selfish ends, some going so far as to consider the forsaking of parents as a sign of liberty and regarding the violation of the laws as a demonstration of equality.  I will certainly do my best to change all this.”

In the second Mandate Yuan Shih-kai justifies the re-establishment of the Confucian worship in a singular way, incidentally showing how utterly incomprehensible to him is the idea of representative government, since he would appear to have imagined that by dispatching circular telegrams to the provincial capitals and receiving affirmative replies from his creatures all that is necessary in the way of a national endorsement of high constitutional measures had been obtained.