In accordance with this decision, very shortly after the 18th January, the dictator’s lieutenants had begun to sound the leaders of public opinion regarding the feasibility of substituting for the nominal Republic a Constitutional Monarchy.  Thus, in a highly characteristic way, all through the tortuous course of the Japanese negotiations, to which he was supposed to be devoting his sole attention in order to save his menaced fatherland, Yuan Shih-kai was assisting his henchmen to indoctrinate Peking officialdom with the idea that the salvation of the State depended more on restoring on a modified basis the old empire than in beating off the Japanese assault.  It was his belief that if some scholar of national repute could be found, who would openly champion these ideas and urge them with such persuasiveness and authority that they became accepted as a Categorical Imperative, the game would be as good as won, the Foreign Powers being too deeply committed abroad to pay much attention to the Far East.  The one man who could have produced that result in the way Yuan Shih-kai desired to see it, the brilliant reformer Liang Chi-chao, famous ever since 1898, however, obstinately refused to lend himself to such work; and, sooner than be involved in any way in the plot, threw up his post of Minister of Justice and retired to the neighbouring city of Tientsin from which centre he was destined to play a notable part.

This hitch occasioned a delay in the public propaganda, though not for long.  Forced to turn to a man of secondary ability, Yuan Shih-kai now invoked the services of a scholar who had been known to be his secret agent in the Old Imperial Senate under the Manchus—­a certain Yang Tu—­whose constant appeals in that chamber had indeed been the means of forcing the Manchus to summon Yuan Shih-kai back to office to their rescue on the outbreak of the Wuchang rebellion in 1911.  After very little discussion everything was arranged.  In the person of this ex-Senator, whose whole appearance was curiously Machiavellian and decadent, the neo-imperialists at last found their champion.

Events now moved quickly enough.  In the Eastern way, very few weeks after the Japanese Ultimatum, a society was founded called the Society for the Preservation of Peace (Chou An Hui) and hundreds of affiliations opened in the provinces.  Money was spent like water to secure adherents, and when the time was deemed ripe the now famous pamphlet of Yang Tu was published broadcast, being in everybody’s hands during the idle summer month of August.  This document is so remarkable as an illustration of the working of that type of Chinese mind which has assimilated some portion of the facts of the modern world and yet remains thoroughly reactionary and illogical, that special attention must be directed to it.  Couched in the form of an argument between two individuals—­one the inquirer, the other the expounder—­it has something of the Old Testament about it both in