had been a daily subject of conversation in the bosom of
his family. The problem, as this misguided man saw it, was simply by
means of an unrivalled display of cunning to profit by the Japanese
suggestion, and at the same time to leave the Japanese in the lurch.

His eldest son, an individual of whom it has been said that he had
absorbed every theory his foreign teachers had taught him without being
capable of applying a single one, was the leader in this family
intrigue. The unhappy victim of a brutal attempt to kill him during the
Revolution, this eldest son had been for years semi-paralyzed: but
brooding over his disaster had only fortified in him the resolve to
succeed his father as legitimate Heir. Having saturated himself in
Napoleonic literature, and being fully aware of how far a bold leader
can go in times of emergency, he daily preached to his father the
necessity of plucking the pear as soon as it was ripe. The older man,
being more skilled and more cautious in statecraft than this youthful
visionary, purposely rejected the idea so long as its execution seemed
to him premature. But at last the point was reached when he was
persuaded to give the monarchy advocates the free hand they solicited,
being largely helped to this decision by the argument that almost
anything in China could be accomplished under cover of the war,--_so
long as vested foreign interests were not jeopardized_.

In accordance with this decision, very shortly after the 18th January,
the dictator's lieutenants had begun to sound the leaders of public
opinion regarding the feasibility of substituting for the nominal
Republic a Constitutional Monarchy. Thus, in a highly characteristic
way, all through the tortuous course of the Japanese negotiations, to
which he was supposed to be devoting his sole attention in order to save
his menaced fatherland, Yuan Shih-kai was assisting his henchmen to
indoctrinate Peking officialdom with the idea that the salvation of the
State depended more on restoring on a modified basis the old empire than
in beating off the Japanese assault. It was his belief that if some
scholar of national repute could be found, who would openly champion
these ideas and urge them with such persuasiveness and authority that
they became accepted as a Categorical Imperative, the game would be as
good as won, the Foreign Powers being too deeply committed abroad to pay
much attention to the Far East. The one man who could have produce