The force of this—­politically—­became finally evident in 1911; and what we have said in our opening sentences should now be clear.  The Chinese Revolution was an emotional rising against the Peking System because it was a bad and inefficient and retrograde system, just as much as against the Manchus, who after all had adopted purely Chinese methods and who were no more foreigners than Scotchmen or Irishmen are foreigners to-day in England.  The Revolution of 1911 derived its meaning and its value—­as well as its mandate—­not from what it proclaimed, but for what it stood for.  Historically, 1911 was the lineal descendant of 1900, which again was the offspring of the economic collapse advertised by the great foreign loans of the Japanese war, loans made necessary because the Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of the only raison d’etre of Peking sovereignty, i.e. the old-time military power.  The story is, therefore, clear and well-connected and so logical in its results that it has about it a finality suggesting the unrolling of the inevitable.

During the Revolution the one decisive factor was shown to be almost at once—­money, nothing but money.  The pinch was felt at the end of the first thirty days.  Provincial remittances ceased; the Boxer quotas remained unpaid; a foreign embargo was laid upon the Customs funds.  The Northern troops, raised and trained by Yuan Shih-kai, when he was Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were, it is true, proving themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and South China troops; yet that circumstance was meaningless.  Those troops were fighting for what had already proved itself a lost cause—­the Peking System as well as the Manchu dynasty.  The fight turned more and more into a money-fight.  It was foreign money which brought about the first truce and the transfer of the so-called republican government from Nanking to Peking.  In the strictest sense of the words every phase of the settlement then arrived at was a settlement in terms of cash.[Footnote:  There is no doubt that the so-called Belgian loan, 1,800,000 pounds of which was paid over in cash at the beginning of 1912, was the instrument which brought every one to terms.]

Had means existed for rapidly replenishing the Chinese Treasury without having recourse to European stockmarkets (whose actions are semi-officially controlled when distant regions are involved) the Republic might have fared better.  But placed almost at once through foreign dictation under a species of police-control, which while nominally derived from Western conceptions, was primarily designed to rehabilitate the semblance of the authority which had been so sensationally extinguished, the Republic remained only a dream; and the world, taught to believe that there could be no real stability until the scheme of government approximated to the conception long formed of Peking absolutism, waited patiently for the rude awakening which came with the