a mere trap, Yuan Shih-kai, as we have shown, had drawn back in apparent alarm.  Nevertheless the words spoken had sunk in deep, for the simple and excellent reason that ever since the coup d’etat of the 4th November, 1913, the necessity of “consolidating” his position by something more permanent than a display of armed force had been a daily subject of conversation in the bosom of his family.  The problem, as this misguided man saw it, was simply by means of an unrivalled display of cunning to profit by the Japanese suggestion, and at the same time to leave the Japanese in the lurch.

His eldest son, an individual of whom it has been said that he had absorbed every theory his foreign teachers had taught him without being capable of applying a single one, was the leader in this family intrigue.  The unhappy victim of a brutal attempt to kill him during the Revolution, this eldest son had been for years semi-paralyzed:  but brooding over his disaster had only fortified in him the resolve to succeed his father as legitimate Heir.  Having saturated himself in Napoleonic literature, and being fully aware of how far a bold leader can go in times of emergency, he daily preached to his father the necessity of plucking the pear as soon as it was ripe.  The older man, being more skilled and more cautious in statecraft than this youthful visionary, purposely rejected the idea so long as its execution seemed to him premature.  But at last the point was reached when he was persuaded to give the monarchy advocates the free hand they solicited, being largely helped to this decision by the argument that almost anything in China could be accomplished under cover of the war,—­ so long as vested foreign interests were not jeopardized.

In accordance with this decision, very shortly after the 18th January, the dictator’s lieutenants had begun to sound the leaders of public opinion regarding the feasibility of substituting for the nominal Republic a Constitutional Monarchy.  Thus, in a highly characteristic way, all through the tortuous course of the Japanese negotiations, to which he was supposed to be devoting his sole attention in order to save his menaced fatherland, Yuan Shih-kai was assisting his henchmen to indoctrinate Peking officialdom with the idea that the salvation of the State depended more on restoring on a modified basis the old empire than in beating off the Japanese assault.  It was his belief that if some scholar of national repute could be found, who would openly champion these ideas and urge them with such persuasiveness and authority that they became accepted as a Categorical Imperative, the game would be as good as won, the Foreign Powers being too deeply committed abroad to pay much attention to the Far East.  The one man who could have produced that result in the way Yuan Shih-kai desired to see it, the brilliant reformer Liang Chi-chao, famous ever since 1898, however, obstinately refused to lend himself to such work; and, sooner than be involved in any way in the plot, threw up his post of Minister of Justice and retired to the neighbouring city of Tientsin from which centre he was destined to play a notable part.