until he was finally ejected by the great rising of 1916.  Thoroughly disappointed in this and many other directions the Southern Party was now emasculated; for the moneyed classes had withheld their support to the end, and without money nothing is possible in China.  The 1913 outbreak, after lasting a bare two months, ignominiously collapsed with the flight of every one of the leaders on whose heads prices were put.  The road was now left open for the last step Yuan Shih-kai had in mind, the coup against Parliament itself, which although unassociated in any direct way with the rising, had undoubtedly maintained secret relations with the rebellious generals in the field.

Parliament had further sinned by appointing a Special Constitutional Drafting Committee which had held its sittings behind closed doors at the Temple of Heaven.  During this drafting of the Permanent Constitution, admittance had been absolutely refused to Yuan Shih-kai’s delegates who had been sent to urge a modification of the decentralization which had been such a characteristic of the Nanking Instrument.  Such details as transpired showed that the principle of absolute money-control was not only to be the dominant note in the Permanent Constitution, but that a new and startling innovation was being included to secure that a de facto Dictatorship should be rendered impossible.  Briefly, it was proposed that when Parliament was not actually in session there should be left in Peking a special Parliamentary Committee, charged with supervising and controlling the Executive, and checking any usurpation of power.

This was enough for Yuan Shih-kai:  he felt that he was not only an object of general suspicion but that he was being treated with contempt.  He determined to finish with it all.  He was as yet, however, only provisional President and it was necessary to show cunning.  Once more he set to work in a characteristic way.  By a liberal use of money Parliament was induced to pass in advance of the main body of articles the Chapter of the Constitution dealing with the election and term of office of the President.  When that had been done the two Chambers sitting as an Electoral College, after the model of the French Parliament, being partly bribed and partly terrorised by a military display, were induced to elect him full President.

On the 10th October he took his final oath of office as President for a term of five years before a great gathering of officials and the whole diplomatic body in the magnificent Throne Room of the Winter Palace.  Safe now in his Constitutional position nothing remained for him but to strike.  On the 4th November he issued an arbitrary Mandate, which received the counter-signature of the whole Cabinet, ordering the unseating of all the so-called Kuomingtang or Radical Senators and Representatives on the counts of conspiracy and secret complicity with the July rising and vaguely referring to the filling of the vacancies thus created by new