d that
result in the way Yuan Shih-kai desired to see it, the brilliant
reformer Liang Chi-chao, famous ever since 1898, however, obstinately
refused to lend himself to such work; and, sooner than be involved in
any way in the plot, threw up his post of Minister of Justice and
retired to the neighbouring city of Tientsin from which centre he was
destined to play a notable part.

This hitch occasioned a delay in the public propaganda, though not for
long. Forced to turn to a man of secondary ability, Yuan Shih-kai now
invoked the services of a scholar who had been known to be his secret
agent in the Old Imperial Senate under the Manchus--a certain Yang
Tu--whose constant appeals in that chamber had indeed been the means of
forcing the Manchus to summon Yuan Shih-kai back to office to their
rescue on the outbreak of the Wuchang rebellion in 1911. After very
little discussion everything was arranged. In the person of this
ex-Senator, whose whole appearance was curiously Machiavellian and
decadent, the neo-imperialists at last found their champion.

Events now moved quickly enough. In the Eastern way, very few weeks
after the Japanese Ultimatum, a society was founded called the Society
for the Preservation of Peace (_Chou An Hui_) and hundreds of
affiliations opened in the provinces. Money was spent like water to
secure adherents, and when the time was deemed ripe the now famous
pamphlet of Yang Tu was published broadcast, being in everybody's hands
during the idle summer month of August. This document is so remarkable
as an illustration of the working of that type of Chinese mind which
has assimilated some portion of the facts of the modern world and yet
remains thoroughly reactionary and illogical, that special attention
must be directed to it. Couched in the form of an argument between two
individuals--one the inquirer, the other the expounder--it has something
of the Old Testament about it both in its blind faith and in its
insistence on a few simple essentials. It embodies everything essential
to an understanding of the old mentality of China which has not yet been
completely destroyed. From a literary standpoint it has also much that
is valuable because it is so naive; and although it is concerned with
such a distant region of the world as China its treatment of modern
political ideas is so bizarre and yet so acute that it will repay study.

It was not, however, for some time, that the significance of this
pamphlet