have no difficulty in realizing how many lives have
been lost and how greatly the country has been crippled both owing to
the blind foreign support given to Yuan Shih-kai during four long and
weary years and to the stupid adhesion to exploded ideas, when a little
intelligence and a little generosity and sympathy would have guided the
nation along very different paths. To have to go back, as China was
forced to do in 1916, and begin over again the work which should have
been performed in 1912 is a handicap which only persistent resolution
can overcome; for the nation has been so greatly impoverished that years
must elapse before a complete recovery from the disorders which have
upset the internal balance can be chronicled: and when we add that the
events of the period May-July, 1917, are likely still further to
increase the burden the nation carries, the complicated nature of the
outlook will be readily understood.

Happily foreign opinion has lately taken turn for the better. Whilst the
substitution of a new kind of rule in place of the Yuan Shih-kai regime,
with its thinly disguised Manchuism and its secret worship of fallen
gods, was at first looked upon as a political collapse tinged with
tragedy--most foreigners refusing to believe in an Asiatic Republic--the
masculine decision of the 9th February, 1917, which diplomatically
ranged China definitely on the side of the Liberal Powers, has caused
something of a _volte face_. Until this decision had been made it was
the fashion to declare that China was not only not fit to be a Republic
but that her final dissolution was only a matter of time. Though the
empire disappeared because it had become an impossible rule in the
modern world--being womanish, corrupt, and mediaeval--to the foreign
mind the empire remained the acme of Chinese civilization; and to kill
it meant to lop off the head of the Chinese giant and to leave lying on
the ground nothing but a corpse. It was in vain to insist that this
simile was wrong and that it was precisely because Chinese civilization
had exhausted itself that a new conception of government had to be
called in to renew the vitality of the people. Men, and particularly
diplomats, refused to understand that this embodied the heart and soul
of the controversy, and that the sole mandate for the Republic, as well
as the supreme reason why it had to be upheld if the country was not to
dissolve, has always lain in the fact that it postulates some