y washed his hands of a plot in which he had been
the prime mover.

The Senate now openly delivered itself over to the accomplishment of the
scheme which had been broached by Yang Tu, the monarchist pamphleteer.
Although this individual still posed as the leader of the movement, in
reality he was nothing but the tool of a remarkable man, one Liang
Shih-yi, famous throughout the country as the most unscrupulous and
adroit politician the Revolution had thrown up. This person, who is
known to have been gravely implicated in many assassinations, and who
was the instrument used in 1912 by Yuan Shih-kai to persuade the Manchu
Imperial Family to abdicate, had in a brief four years accumulated a
vast fortune by the manipulations he had indulged in as Director-General
of The Bank of Communications, an institution which, because it disposed
of all the railway receipts, was always in funds even when the Central
Treasury itself was empty. By making himself financially indispensable
to Yuan Shih-kai he had become recognized as the power behind the
Throne; for although, owing to foreign clamour, he had been dismissed
from his old office of Chief Secretary to the President (which he had
utilized to effect the sale of offices far and wide) he was a daily
visitor to the Presidential Palace and his creatures daily pulled all
the numerous strings.

The scheme now adopted by the Senate was to cause the provinces to flood
Peking with petitions, sent up through the agency of "The Society for
the Preservation of Peace," demanding that the Republic be replaced by
that form of government which the people alone understood, the name
Constitutional Monarchy being selected merely as a piece of political
window-dressing to please the foreign world. A vast amount of organizing
had to be done behind the scenes before the preliminaries were
completed: but on the 6th October the scheme was so far advanced that in
response to "hosts of petitions" the Senate, sitting in its capacity of
Legislative Chamber (_Li Fa Yuan_) passed a so-called King-making bill
in which elaborate regulations were adopted for referring the question
under discussion to a provincial referendum. According to this naive
document the provinces were to be organized into electoral colleges, and
the votes of the electors, after being recorded, were to be sent up
to Peking for scrutiny. Some attempt was made to follow Dr. Goodnow's
advice to secure as far as possible that the various cl