y of sending a Chinese force to
co-operate in the attack on the German stronghold, that project was
never matured, whilst his subsequent contrivances, notably the
establishment of a so-called war-zone in Shantung, were without
international value, and attracted no attention save in Japan.

Chinese, however, did not remain blind to the trend of events. After the
fall of Tsingtao and the subsequent complications with Japan, which so
greatly served to increase the complexities of a nebulous situation,
certain lines of thought insensibly developed. That the influential
classes in China should have desired that Germany should by some means
rehabilitate herself in Europe and so be placed in a position to
chastise a nation that for twenty years had brought nothing but sorrow
to them was perhaps only natural; and it is primarily to this one cause
that so-called sympathy with Germany during the first part of the war
has been due. But it must also be noticed that the immense German
propaganda in China during the first two years of the war, coupled with
the successes won in Russia and elsewhere, powerfully impressed the
population--not so much because they were attracted by the feats of a
Power that had enthroned militarism, but because they wrongly supposed
that sooner or later the effects of this military display would be not
only to secure the relaxation of the Japanese grip on the country but
would compel the Powers to re-cast their pre-war policies in China and
abandon their attempts at placing the country under financial
supervision. Thus, by the irony of Fate, Germany in Eastern Asia for the
best part of 1914, 1915 and 1916, stood for the aspirations of the
oppressed--a moral which we may very reasonably hope will not escape the
attention of the Foreign Offices of the world. Nor must it be forgotten
that the modern Chinese army, being like the Japanese, largely
Germany-trained and Germany-armed, had a natural predilection for
Teutonism; and since the army, as we have shown, plays a powerful role
in the politics of the Republic, public opinion was greatly swayed by
what it proclaimed through its accredited organs.

Be this as it may, it was humanly impossible for such a vast country
with such vast resources in men and raw materials to remain permanently
quiescent during an universal conflagration when there was so much to be
salvaged. Slowly the idea became general in China that something had to
be done; that is that a stat