The method he employed was simplicity itself, and it is peculiarly characteristic of the man that he should have been so bluntly cynical.  Though the Provisional Nanking Constitution, which was the “law” of China so far as there was any law at all, had laid down specifically in article XIX that all measures affecting the National Treasury must receive the assent of Parliament, Yuan Shih-kai, pretending that the small Advisory Council which had assisted him during the previous year and which had only just been dissolved, had sanctioned a foreign loan, peremptorily ordered the signature of the great Reorganization Loan of 25,000,000 pounds which had been secretly under negotiation all Winter with the financial agents of six Powers, [Footnote:  The American Group at the last moment dropped out of the Sextuple combination (prior to the signature of the contract) after President Wilson had made his well-known pronouncement deprecating the association of Americans in any financial undertakings which impinged upon the rights of sovereignty of a friendly Power,—­which was his considered view of the manner in which foreign governments were assisting their nationals to gain control of the Salt Administration.  The exact language the President used was that the conditions of the loan seemed “to touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself,” and that a loan thus obtained was “obnoxious” to the principles upon which the American government rests.  It is to be hoped that President Wilson’s dictum will be universally accepted after the war and that meddling in Chinese affairs will cease.] although the rupture which had come in the previous June as a forerunner to the Crisp loan had caused the general public to lose sight of the supreme importance of the financial factor.  Parliament, seeing that apart from the possibility of a Foreign Debt Commission being created something after the Turkish and Egyptian models, a direct challenge to its existence had been offered, raged and stormed and did its utmost to delay the question; but the Chief Executive having made up his mind shut himself up in his Palace and absolutely refused to see any Parliamentary representatives.  Although the Minister of Finance himself hesitated to complete the transaction in the face of the rising storm and actually fled the capital, he was brought back by special train and forced to complete the agreement.  At four o’clock in the morning on the 25th April the last documents were signed in the building of a foreign bank and the Finance Minister, galloping his carriage suddenly out of the compound to avoid possible bombs, reported to his master that at last—­in spite of the nominal foreign control which was to govern the disbursement—­ a vast sum was at his disposal to further his own ends.