ould probably have been successful." We do not
know how Americans will like this kind of interpretation of their
history; but at least they will not fail to note what dismal results it
hastened on in China. With the experimental Eighteenth Century French
Republic; with the old Spanish Colonies of Central and South America;
and above all with Mexico, Dr. Goodnow deals in the same vein. Vast
movements, which can be handled only tentatively even in exhaustive
essays are dismissed in misleading sentences framed so as to serve as
mere introduction to the inevitable climax--the Chinese Constitutional
Monarchy of 1915 with Yuan Shih-kai as Emperor.

Yet this is not all. As if in alarm at the very conclusions he so
purposely reaches, at the end of his Memorandum he reduces these
conclusions to naught by stating that three impossible conditions are
necessary to consummate the Restoration of the Monarchy in China, (1) no
opposition should be aroused, (2) the law of succession must be properly
settled, (3) Full provision must be made for the development of
Constitutional Government. That these conditions were known to be
impossible, everyone in the Far East had long admitted. Had Dr. Goodnow
paid the slightest attention to the course of history in China he would
have known (a) that any usurpation of the Throne would infallibly lead
to rebellion in China and intervention on the part of Japan, (b) that
Yuan Shih-kai's power was purely personal and as such could not be
transmitted to any son by any means known to the human intellect, (c)
that all Yuan Shih-kai's sons were worthless, the eldest son being
semi-paralyzed, (d) that constitutional government and the Eastern
conception of kingship, which is purely theocratic, are so antithetical
that they cannot possibly co-exist, any re-establishment of the throne
being _ipso facto_ the re-establishment of a theocracy, (e) that
although he so constantly speaks of the low political knowledge of the
people, the Chinese have had a most complete form of local
self-government from the earliest times, the political problem of the
day being simply to gather up and express these local forms in some
centralized system: (f) the so-called non-patriotism of the Chinese is
non-existent and is an idea which has been spread abroad owing to the
complete foreign misunderstanding of certain basic facts--for instance
that under the Empire foreign affairs were the sole concern of the
Emperors, provincial Chi