Some will say to me that a revolution is an unavoidable thing.  Of all things only the facts cannot be undone.  Why then should I bother myself especially as my last effort fell on deaf ears.  This I realize; but it is not my nature to abandon what is my conviction.  Therefore, although aware of the futility of my words, I cannot refrain from uttering them all the same.  Chu Yuan drowned himself in the Pilo and Chia Sheng died from his horse.  Ask them why they did these things, they will say they did not know.  Once I wrote a piece of poetry containing the following lines: 

    “Ten years after you will think of me,
    The country is excited.  To whom shall I speak?”

I have spoken much in my life, and all my words have become subjects for meditation ten years after they were uttered.  Never, however, have any of my words attracted the attention of my own countrymen before a decade has spent itself.  Is it a misfortune for my words or a misfortune to the Country?  My hope is that there will be no occasion for the country to think of my present words ten years hence.

CHAPTER XI

THE DREAM EMPIRE

“The people’s voice,” And the action of the powers (from September to December, 1915)

The effect of Liang Ch’i-chao’s appeal was noticeable at once:  there were ominous mutterings among all the great class of “intellectuals” who form such a remarkable element throughout the country.  Nevertheless there were no overt acts attempted against the authority of Peking.  Although literary and liberal China was now thoroughly convinced that the usurpation which Yuan Shih-kai proposed to practise would be a national disgrace and lead to far-reaching complications, this force were too scattered and too much under the power of the military to tender at once any active opposition as would have been the case in Western countries.  Yuan Shih-kai, measuring this situation very accurately, and aware that he could easily become an object of popular detestation if the people followed the lead of the scholars, decided to place himself outside and beyond the controversy by throwing the entire responsibility on the Tsan Cheng Yuan, the puppet Senate he had erected in place of the parliament destroyed by his coup d’etat of the 4th November, 1913.  In a message issued to that body on the 6th September, 1915, he declared that although in his opinion the time was inappropriate for making any change in the form of State, the matter demanded the most careful and serious consideration which he had no doubt would be given to it.  If a change of so momentous a character as was now being publicly advocated were decided in too great a haste it might create grave complications:  therefore the opinion of the nation should be consulted by the method of the ballot.  And with this nunc dimittis he officially washed his hands of a plot in which he had been the prime mover.