Yet this is not all.  As if in alarm at the very conclusions he so purposely reaches, at the end of his Memorandum he reduces these conclusions to naught by stating that three impossible conditions are necessary to consummate the Restoration of the Monarchy in China, (1) no opposition should be aroused, (2) the law of succession must be properly settled, (3) full provision must be made for the development of Constitutional Government.  That these conditions were known to be impossible, everyone in the Far East had long admitted.  Had Dr. Goodnow paid the slightest attention to the course of history in China he would have known (a) that any usurpation of the Throne would infallibly lead to rebellion in China and intervention on the part of Japan, (b) that Yuan Shih-kai’s power was purely personal and as such could not be transmitted to any son by any means known to the human intellect, (c) that all Yuan Shih-kai’s sons were worthless, the eldest son being semi-paralyzed, (d) that constitutional government and the Eastern conception of kingship, which is purely theocratic, are so antithetical that they cannot possibly co-exist, any re-establishment of the throne being ipso facto the re-establishment of a theocracy, (e) that although he so constantly speaks of the low political knowledge of the people, the Chinese have had a most complete form of local self-government from the earliest times, the political problem of the day being simply to gather up and express these local forms in some centralized system:  (f) the so-called non-patriotism of the Chinese is non-existent and is an idea which has been spread abroad owing to the complete foreign misunderstanding of certain basic facts—­for instance that under the Empire foreign affairs were the sole concern of the Emperors, provincial China prior to 1911 being a socio-economic confederation resembling mediaeval contrivances such as the Hanseatic League—­a provincial confederation not concerning itself with any matter which lay outside its everyday economic life, such as territorial overlordship or frontier questions or the regulation of sea-port intercourse etc., because such matters were meaningless.  It was only when foreign encroachment in the post-Japanese war period (i. e. after 1895) carried problems from the fringes of the Empire into the economic life of the people that their pride was touched and that in spite of “their lack of experience and knowledge in political affairs” they suddenly displayed a remarkable patriotic feeling, the history of China during the past two decades being only comprehensible when this capital contention, namely the reality of Chinese patriotism, is given the central place.