determined to get reasonable treatment.  The Chinese as a people may be very irritating in the slowness with which they do certain things—­though they are as quick in business as the quickest Anglo-Saxon—­but that is no excuse why men who call themselves superior should treat them with contempt.  The Chinese are the first to acknowledge that it will take them a generation at least to modernize effectively their country and their government; but they believe that having erected a Republic and having declared themselves as disciples of the West they are justified in expecting the same treatment and consideration which are to be given after the war even to the smallest and weakest nations of Europe.

CHAPTER XVI

CHINA AND THE WAR

The question of Chinese sentiments on the subject of the war, as well as the precise relations between the Chinese Government and the two groups of belligerents, are matters which have been totally misunderstood.  To those who have grasped the significance of the exhaustive preceding account of the Republic in travail, this statement should not cause surprise; for China has been in no condition to play anything but an insignificant and unsatisfactory role in world-politics.

When the world-war broke out China was still in the throes of her domestic troubles and without any money at all in her Central Treasury; and although Yuan Shih-kai, on being suddenly confronted with an unparalleled international situation, did initiate certain negotiations with the German Legation with a view to securing a cancellation of the Kiaochow lease, the ultimatum which Japan dispatched to Germany on the 15th August, 1914, completely nullified his tentative proposals.  Yuan Shih-kai had, indeed, not been in the slightest degree prepared for such a sensational development as war between Japan and Germany over the question of a cruiser-base established on territory leased from China; and although he considered the possibility of sending a Chinese force to co-operate in the attack on the German stronghold, that project was never matured, whilst his subsequent contrivances, notably the establishment of a so-called war-zone in Shantung, were without international value, and attracted no attention save in Japan.

Chinese, however, did not remain blind to the trend of events.  After the fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation, certain lines of thought insensibly developed.  That the influential classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing but sorrow to them was perhaps only natural; and it is primarily to this one cause that so-called sympathy with Germany during the first part of the war has been due.  But it must also be noticed that the