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 were
allowed to do no work, were useful in running backwards and forwards
between the Legations and the Presidential headquarters and in making
each Power suppose that its influence was of increasing importance. It
was made abundantly clear that in Yuan Shih-kai's estimation the
Legations played in international politics much the same role that
provincial capitals did in domestic politics: so long as you bound both
to benevolent neutrality the main problem--the consolidation of
dictatorial power--could be pushed on with as you wished. Money,
however, remained utterly lacking and a new twenty-five million sterling
loan was spoken of as inevitable--the accumulated deficit in 1914 being
alone estimated at thirty-eight million pounds. B