Far and wide Yuan Shih-kai now stretched his nets.  He even employed Americans throughout the United States in the capacity of press-agents in order to keep American public opinion favourable to him, hoping to invoke their assistance against his life-enemy—­Japan—­should that be necessary.  The precise details of this propaganda and the sums spent in its prosecution are known to the writer; if he refrains from publishing them it is solely for reasons of policy.  England it was not necessary to deal with in this way.  Chance had willed that the British Representative in Peking should be an old friend who had known the Dictator intimately since his Korean days; and who faithful to the extraordinary English love of hero-worship believed that such a surprising character could do little wrong.  British policy which has always been a somewhat variable quantity in China, owing to the spasmodic attention devoted to such a distant problem, may be said to have been non-existent during all this period—­a state of affairs not conducive to international happiness.

Slowly the problem developed in a shiftless, irresolute way.  Unable to see that China had vastly changed, and that government by rascality had become a physical and moral impossibility, the Legations in Peking adopted an attitude of indifference leaving Yuan Shih-kai to wreak his will on the people.  The horde of foreign advisers who had been appointed merely as a piece of political window-dressing, although they were allowed to do no work, were useful in running backwards and forwards between the Legations and the Presidential headquarters and in making each Power suppose that its influence was of increasing importance.  It was made abundantly clear that in Yuan Shih-kai’s estimation the Legations played in international politics much the same role that provincial capitals did in domestic politics:  so long as you bound both to benevolent neutrality the main problem—­the consolidation of dictatorial power—­could be pushed on with as you wished.  Money, however, remained utterly lacking and a new twenty-five million sterling loan was spoken of as inevitable—­the accumulated deficit in 1914 being alone estimated at thirty-eight million pounds.  But although this financial dearth was annoying, Chinese resources were sufficient to allow the account to be carried on from day to day.  Some progress was made in railways, building concessions being liberally granted to foreign corporations, this policy having received a great impetus from the manner in which Dr. Sun Yat Sen had boomed the necessity for better communications during the short time he had ruled at a National Railway Bureau in Shanghai, an office from which he had been relieved in 1913 on it being discovered that he was secretly indenting for quick-firing guns.  Certain questions proved annoying and insoluble, for instance the Tibetan question concerning which England was very resolute, as well as the perpetual risings in Inner Mongolia, a region so close to Peking that concentrations of troops were necessary.  But on the whole as time went on there was increasing indifference both among the Foreign Powers and Chinese for the extraordinary state of affairs which had been allowed to grow up.