fought and intriguing against one another, two occupations in which the product of the older school of men in China excels.  Provincial levies which had any military virtue, were gradually disbanded, though many of the rascals and rapscallions, who were open menaces to good government were left with arms in their hands so as to be an argument in favour of drastic police-rule.  Thus it is significant of the underlying falseness and weakness of the dictator’s character that he never dared to touch the troops of the reprobate General Chang Hsun, who had made trouble for years, and who had nearly embroiled China in war with Japan during the so-called Second Revolution (July-August, 1913) by massacring some Japanese civilians in the streets of Nanking when the city was recaptured.  So far from disbanding his men, Chang Hsun managed constantly to increase his army of 30,000 men on the plea that the post of Inspector-General of the Yangtsze Valley, which had been given to him as a reward for refusing to throw in his lot with the Southern rebels, demanded larger forces.  Yuan Shih-kai, although half-afraid of him, found him at various periods useful as a counterweight to other generals in the provinces; in any case he was not the man to risk anything by attempting to crush him.  As he was planted with his men astride of the strategically important Pukow railway, it was always possible to order him at a moment’s notice into the Yangtsze Valley which was thus constantly under the menace of fire and sword.

Far and wide Yuan Shih-kai now stretched his nets.  He even employed Americans throughout the United States in the capacity of press-agents in order to keep American public opinion favourable to him, hoping to invoke their assistance against his life-enemy—­ Japan—­should that be necessary.  The precise details of this propaganda and the sums spent in its prosecution are known to the writer; if he refrains from publishing them it is solely for reasons of policy.  England it was not necessary to deal with in this way.  Chance had willed that the British Representative in Peking should be an old friend who had known the Dictator intimately since his Korean days; and who faithful to the extraordinary English love of hero-worship believed that such a surprising character could do little wrong.  British policy which has always been a somewhat variable quantity in China, owing to the spasmodic attention devoted to such a distant problem, may be said to have been non-existent during all this period—­a state of affairs not conducive to international happiness.

Slowly the problem developed in a shiftless, irresolute way.  Unable to see that China had vastly changed, and that government by rascality had become a physical and moral impossibility, the Legations in Peking adopted an attitude of indifference leaving Yuan Shih-kai to wreak his will on the people.  The horde of foreign advisers who had been appointed merely as a piece of political window-dressing, although they