This hitch occasioned a delay in the public propaganda, though not for long.  Forced to turn to a man of secondary ability, Yuan Shih-kai now invoked the services of a scholar who had been known to be his secret agent in the Old Imperial Senate under the Manchus—­a certain Yang Tu—­whose constant appeals in that chamber had indeed been the means of forcing the Manchus to summon Yuan Shih-kai back to office to their rescue on the outbreak of the Wuchang rebellion in 1911.  After very little discussion everything was arranged.  In the person of this ex-Senator, whose whole appearance was curiously Machiavellian and decadent, the neo-imperialists at last found their champion.

Events now moved quickly enough.  In the Eastern way, very few weeks after the Japanese Ultimatum, a society was founded called the Society for the Preservation of Peace (Chou An Hut) and hundreds of affiliations opened in the provinces.  Money was spent like water to secure adherents, and when the time was deemed ripe the now famous pamphlet of Yang Tu was published broadcast, being in everybody’s hands during the idle summer month of August.  This document is so remarkable as an illustration of the working of that type of Chinese mind which has assimilated some portion of the facts of the modern world and yet remains thoroughly reactionary and illogical, that special attention must be directed to it.  Couched in the form of an argument between two individuals —­one the inquirer, the other the expounder—­it has something of the old Testament about it both in its blind faith and in its insistence on a few simple essentials.  It embodies everything essential to an understanding of the old mentality of China which has not yet been completely destroyed.  From a literary standpoint it has also much that is valuable because it is so naive; and although it is concerned with such a distant region of the world as China its treatment of modern political ideas is so bizarre and yet so acute that it will repay study.

It was not, however, for some time, that the significance of this pamphlet was generally understood.  It was such an amazing departure from old precedents for the Peking Government to lend itself to public propaganda as a revolutionary weapon that the mind of the people refused to credit the fatal turn things were taking.  But presently when it became known that the “Society for the Preservation of Peace” was actually housed in the Imperial City and in daily relations with the President’s Palace; and that furthermore the Procurator-General of Peking, in response to innumerable memorials of denunciation, having attempted to proceed against the author and publishers of the pamphlet, as well as against the Society, had been forced to leave the capital under threats against his life, the document was accepted at its face-value.  Almost with a gasp of incredulity China at last realized that Yuan Shih-kai had been seduced to the point of openly attempting to make himself Emperor.  From