which they had first placed on their banners—­“blot out the Manchus and all foreign things.”  Both had sapped the old civilization to its foundations.  But the programme they had proposed was idealistic, not practical.  One element could be cleared away—­the other had to be endured.  Had the Boxers been sensible they would have modified their programme to the extent of protecting the foreigners, whilst they assailed the Dynasty which had brought them so low.  The Court Party, as we have said, seduced their leaders to acting in precisely the reverse sense.

Yuan Shih-kai was neither a Boxer, nor yet a believer in idealistic foolishness.  He had realized that the essence of successful rule in the China of the Twentieth Century was to support the foreign point of view—­nominally at least—­because foreigners disposed of unlimited monetary resources, and had science on their side.  He knew that so long as he did not openly flout foreign opinion by indulging in bare-faced assassinations, he would be supported owing to the international reputation he had established in 1900.  Arguing from these premises, his instinct also told him that an appearance of legality must always be sedulously preserved and the aspirations of the nation nominally satisfied.  For this reason he arranged matters in such a manner as to appear always as the instrument of fate.  For this reason, although he destroyed the revolutionists on the mid-Yangtsze, to equalize matters, on the lower Yangtsze he secretly ordered the evacuation of Nanking by the Imperialist forces so that he might have a tangible argument with which to convince the Manchus regarding the root and branch reform which he knew was necessary.  That reform had been accepted in principle by the Throne when it agreed to the so-called Nineteen Fundamental Articles, a corpus of demands which all the Northern Generals had endorsed and had indeed insisted should be the basis of government before they would fight the rebellious South in 1911.  There is reason to believe that provided he had been made de facto Regent, Yuan Shih-kai would have supported to the end a Manchu Monarchy.  But the surprising swiftness of the Revolutionary Party’s action in proclaiming the Republic at Nanking on the 1st January, 1912, and the support which foreign opinion gave that venture confused him.  He had already consented to peace negotiations with the revolutionary South in the middle of December, 1911, and once he was drawn into those negotiations his policy wavered, the armistice in the field being constantly extended because he saw that the Foreign Powers, and particularly England, were averse from further civil war.  Having dispatched a former lieutenant, Tong Shao-yi, to Shanghai as his Plenipotentiary, he soon found himself committed to a course of action different from what he had originally contemplated.  South China and Central China insisted so vehemently that the only solution that was acceptable to them was the permanent and absolute elimination