d carrying out one of the most stupendous reforms that
has ever been undertaken in human government--that of transforming four
thousand years of conservatism of four hundred millions of people in
the short space of a few months.

Given: A people who cannot make a nail, to build a railroad.

Given: A people who dare not plow a deep furrow for fear of disturbing
the spirits of the place, to open gold, silver, iron and coal mines.

Given: A people who in 4,000 years did not have the genius to develop a
decent high school, to open a university in the capital of every
province.

These are three of the score or more of equally difficult problems that
the Emperor undertook to solve in twice as many days. In order to the
solution of these problems there was organized in Peking a Reform Party
of hot-headed, radical young scholars not one of whom has ever turned
out to be a statesman. They were brilliant young men, many of them, but
they so lost their heads in their enthusiasm for reform that they
forgot that their government was in the hands of the same old
conservative leaders under whom it had been for forty centuries.

They introduced into the palace as the private adviser of the Emperor,
Kang Yu-wei, as we have already shown, to whom was thus offered one of
the greatest opportunities that was ever given to a human being--that
of being the leader in this great reform. He was hailed as a young
Confucius, but his popularity was short-lived, for he so lacked all
statesmanship as to allow the young Emperor to issue twenty-seven
edicts, disposing of twenty-seven difficult problems such as I have
given above in about twice that many days, and it is this hot-headed
and unstatesman-like young "Confucius" who now calls Yuan Shih-kai an
opportunist and a traitor because he did not enter into the following
plot.

After the Emperor had dismissed two conservative vice-presidents of a
Board, two governors of provinces, and a half dozen other useless
conservative leaders, they plotted to overthrow him by appealing to the
ambition of the Empress Dowager and induce her to dethrone him and
again assume the reins of government. They argued that "he was her
adopted son, it was she who had placed him on the throne, and she was
therefore responsible for his mistakes." They complimented her on "the
wisdom which she had manifested, and the statesmanship she had
exhibited" during the thirty years and more of her regency. To all
which she liste