ut although this
financial dearth was annoying, Chinese resources were sufficient to
allow the account to be carried on from day to day. Some progress was
made in railways, building concessions being liberally granted to
foreign corporations, this policy having received a great impetus from
the manner in which Dr. Sun Yat Sen had boomed the necessity for better
communications during the short time he had ruled at a National Railway
Bureau in Shanghai, an office from which he had been relieved in 1913 on
it being discovered that he was secretly indenting for quick-firing
guns. Certain questions proved annoying and insoluble, for instance the
Tibetan question concerning which England was very resolute, as well as
the perpetual risings in Inner Mongolia, a region so close to Peking
that concentrations of troops were necessary. But on the whole as time
went on there was increasing indifference both among the Foreign Powers
and Chinese for the extraordinary state of affairs which had been
allowed to grow up.

There was one notable exception, however, Japan. Never relaxing her grip
on a complicated problem, watchful and active, where others were
indifferent and slothful, Japan bided her time. Knowing that the hour
had almost arrived when it would be possible to strike, Japan was vastly
active behind the scenes in China long before the outbreak of the
European war gave her the longed for opportunity; and largely because of
her the pear, which seemed already almost ripe, finally withered on the
tree.

FOOTNOTES:

[12] It is significant that Dr. Goodnow carried out all his
Constitutional studies in Germany, specializing in that department known
as Administrative Law which has no place, fortunately, in Anglo-Saxon
conceptions of the State.

CHAPTER V

THE FACTOR OF JAPAN

(FROM THE OUTBREAK OF THE WORLD-WAR, 1ST AUGUST, 1914, TO THE FILING OF
THE TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS, 18TH JANUARY, 1915)

The thunderclap of the European war shattered the uneasy calm in China,
not because the Chinese knew anything of the mighty issues which were to
be fought out with such desperation and valour, but because the presence
of the German colony of Kiaochow on Chinese soil and the activity of
German cruisers in the Yellow Sea brought the war to China's very doors.
Vaguely conscious that this might spell disaster to his own ambitious
plans, Yuan Shih-kai was actually in the midst of tentative negotiations
with the German Legation regardi