American
engineers,--to the American was assigned the important section between
Ichang and Chengtu,--was bringing matters to a head before I left China.
The Changsha outbreak in the early summer was directed against the
Government's railway policy, represented for the moment in the newly
appointed Director of Communications, the Manchu Tuan Fang, who visited
the United States in 1906 as a member of the Imperial Commission. Many
will remember the courteous old man, perhaps the most progressive of all
the Manchu leaders. I had hoped to meet him in China, but on inquiring
his whereabouts when in Shanghai I was told that he had been degraded
from his post as Viceroy of Nanking and was living in retirement. A few
weeks later the papers were full of his new appointment, extolling his
patriotism in accepting an office inferior to the one from which he had
been removed. But delays followed, and when the rioting occurred in
Changsha he had not yet arrived at headquarters in Hankow. It was said
openly that he was afraid. On my way north the train drew up one evening
on a siding, and when I asked the reason I was told a special train was
going south bearing His Excellency Tuan Fang to his post. He had just
come from a conference at Chang-te-ho with Yuan Shih Kai, who was living
there in retirement nursing his "gouty leg." If only one could have
heard that last talk between the two great supporters of a falling
dynasty.

And one went on his way south to take up the impossible task of stemming
the tide of revolution, and before four months were past he was dead,
struck down and beheaded by his own soldiers in a little Szechuan town,
while the other, biding his time, stands to-day at the head of the new
Republic of the East.

The Lu-Han railway, as the Peking-Hankow line is called, crosses three
provinces, Hupeh, Honan, and Chihli. Save for low hills on the Hupeh
frontier, it runs the whole way through a flat, featureless country,
cultivated by hand, almost every square foot of it. Seven hundred miles
of rice- and millet-fields and vegetable gardens unbroken by wall or
hedge; nothing to cast a shadow on the dead level except an occasional
walled town or temple grove! And the horrible land was all alive with
swarming, toiling, ant-hill humanity. It was a nightmare.

On the second day we reached the Hoang Ho, China's sorrow and the
engineer's despair. The much-discussed bridge is two miles long,
crossing the river on one hundred an