At once it became clear again, as happens a thousand times during every year in the East, that what is not nipped in the bud grows with such malignant swiftness as finally to blight all honest intentions.  Had steps been taken on or about the 23rd May to detain forcibly in Peking the ringleader of the recalcitrant Military Governors, one General Ni Shih-chung of Anhui, history would have been very different and China spared much national and international humiliation.  Six years of stormy happenings had certainly bred in the nation a desire for constitutionalism and a detestation of military domination.  But this desire and detestation required firm leadership.  Without that leadership it was inchoate and powerless, and indeed made furtive by the constant fear of savage reprisals.  A great opportunity had come and a great opportunity had been lost.  President Li Yuan-hung’s personal argument, communicated to the writer, was that in sealing the Mandate dissolving Parliament he had chosen the lesser of two evils, for although South China and the Chinese Navy declared they would defend Parliament to the last, they were far away whilst large armies were echeloned along the railways leading into Peking and daily threatening action.  The events of the next year or so must prove conclusively, in spite of what has happened in this month of June, 1917, that the corrupt power of the sword can no longer even nominally rule China.

Meanwhile the veteran Dr. Wu Ting-fang, true to his faith, declared that no power on earth would cause him to sign a Mandate possessing no legality behind it; and he indeed obstinately resisted every attempt to seduce him.  Although his resignation was refused he stood his ground manfully, and it became clear that some other expedient would have to be resorted to.  In the small hours of the 13th June what this was was made clear:  by a rapid reshuffling of the cards Dr. Wu Ting-fang’s resignation was accepted and the general officer commanding the Peking Gendarmerie, a genial soul named General Chiang Chao-tsung, who had survived unscathed the vicissitudes of six years of revolution, was appointed to act in his stead and duly counter-signed the fateful Mandate which was at once printed and promulgated at four o’clock in the morning.  It has been stated to the writer that had it not been so issued four battalions of Chang Hsun’s savage pigtailed soldiery, who had been bivouacked for some days in the grounds of the Temple of Heaven, would have been let loose on the capital.  The actual text of the Mandate proves conclusively that the President had no hand in its drafting—­one argument being sufficient to prove that, namely the deliberate ignoring of the fact that Parliament had been called into being by virture of article 53 of the Nanking Provisional Constitution and that under article 54 its specific duty was to act as a grand constitutional conference to draft and adopt the Permanent Constitution, article 55 furthermore giving Parliament