Meanwhile, for the time being, in China as in countries ten thousand miles away, ministerial irresponsibility is the enemy; that is to say that so-called Cabinet-rule, with the effacement of the Chief Executive, has tended to make Cabinet Ministers removed from effective daily control.  All sorts of things are done which should not be done and men are still in charge of portfolios who should be summarily expelled from the capital for malpractices. [Footnote:  Since this was written two Cabinet Ministers have been summarily arrested.] But although Chinese are slow to take action and prefer to delay all decisions until they have about them the inexorable quality which is associated with Fate, there is not the slightest doubt that in the long run the dishonest suffer, and an increasingly efficient body of men take their place.  From every point of view then there is reason for congratulation in the present position, and every hope that the future will unroll peacefully.

A visit to Parliament under the new regime is a revelation to most men:  the candid come away with an impression which is never effaced from their minds.  There is a peculiar suggestiveness even in the location of the Houses of the National Assembly.  They are tucked away in the distant Western city immediately under the shadow of the vast Tartar Wall as if it had been fully expected when they were called into being that they would never justify their existence, and that the crushing weight of the great bastion of brick and stone surrounding the capital would soon prove to them how futile it was for such palpable intruders to aspire to national control.  Under Yuan Shih-kai, as under the Manchus, they were an exercise in the arm of government, something which was never to be allowed to harden into a settled practice.  They were first cousins to railways, to electrical power, to metalled roadways and all those other modern instances beginning to modify an ancient civilization entirely based on agriculture; and because they were so distantly related to the real China of the farm-yard it was thought that they would always stand outside the national life.

That was what the fools believed.  Yet in a copy of the rules of procedure of the old Imperial Senate (Tzuchengyuan) the writer finds this note written in 1910:  “The Debates of this body have been remarkable during the very first session.  They make it seem clear that the first National Parliament of 1913 will seize control of China and nullify the power of the Throne.  Result, revolution—­” Though the dating is a little confused, the prophecy is worthy of record.