In spite of these assurances great uneasiness was felt.  The foreign Legations, which are very imperfectly informed regarding Chinese affairs although living in the midst of them, could not be convinced that internal peace could be so suddenly attained after five years of such fierce rivalries.  Among the many gloomy predictions made at the time, the most common to fall from the lips of Foreign Plenipotentiaries was the remark that the Japanese would be in full occupation of the country within three months—­the one effective barrier to their advance having been removed.  No better illustration could be given of the inadequate grasp of politics possessed by those whose peculiar business it should be to become expert in the science of cause and effect.  In China, as in the Balkans, professional diplomacy errs so constantly because it has in the main neither the desire nor the training to study dispassionately from day to day all those complex phenomena which go to make up modern nationalism.  Guided in its conduct almost entirely by a policy of personal predilections, which is fitfully reinforced by the recollection of precedents, it is small wonder if such mountains of mistakes choke every Legation dossier.  Determined to have nothing whatever to do, save in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and inclining naturally towards ideals which have long been abandoned in the workaday world, diplomacy is the instinctive lover of obscurantism and the furtive enemy of progress.  Distrusting all those generous movements which spring from the popular desire to benefit by change, it follows from this that the diplomatic brotherhood inclines towards those truly detestable things—­secret compacts.  In the present instance, having been bitterly disappointed by the complete collapse of the strong man theory, it was only natural that consolation should be sought by casting doubt on the future.  Never have sensible men been so absurd.  The life-story of Yuan Shih-kai, and the part European and Japanese diplomacy played in that story, form a chapter which should be taught as a warning to all who enter politics as a career, since there is exhibited in this history a complete compendium of all the more vicious traits of Byzantinism.

The first acts of President Li Yuan-hung rapidly restored confidence and advertised to the keen-eyed that the end of the long drawn-out Revolution had come.  Calling before him all the generals in the capital, he told them with sincerity and simplicity that their country’s fortunes rested in their hands; and he asked them to take such steps as would be in the nature of a permanent insurance against foreign interference in the affairs of the Republic.  He was at once given fervent support.  A mass meeting of the military was followed by the whole body of commissioned men volunteering to hold themselves personally responsible for the maintenance of peace and order in the capital.  The dreadful disorders which had ushered in the Yuan Shih-kai regime were thus made impossible; and almost at once men went about their business as usual.