e brigade
generals intrigue against the division leaders, and even colonels are
doing all they can to further their personal power. The Peking
government is a stuffed sham, taking orders from the military
governors of the provinces, living only on account of jealousies among
these generals, and by the grace of foreign diplomatic support. It is
actually bankrupt, and this actual state will soon be formally
recognized. The thing for us to do is to go ahead, maintain in good
faith the work of the revolution, give this province the best possible
civil administration; then in the inevitable approaching debacle, the
southern government will be ready to serve as the nucleus of a genuine
reconstruction. Meantime we want, if not the formal recognition of
foreign governments, at least their benevolent neutrality.

Dr. Sun still embodies in himself the spirit of the revolution of
1911. So far as that was not anti-Manchu it was in essence
nationalistic, and only accidentally republican. The day after the
inauguration of Dr. Sun, a memorial was dedicated to the seventy-two
patriot heroes who fell in an abortive attempt in Canton to throw off
the Manchu yoke, some six months before the successful revolt. The
monument is the most instructive single lesson which I have seen in
the political history of the revolution. It is composed of seventy-two
granite blocks. Upon each is engraved: Given by the Chinese National
League of Jersey City, or Melbourne, or Mexico, or Liverpool, or
Singapore, etc. Chinese nationalism is a product of Chinese migration
to foreign countries; Chinese nationalism on foreign shores financed
the revolution, and largely furnished its leaders and provided its
organization. Sun Yat Sen was the incarnation of this nationalism,
which was more concerned with freeing China--and Asia--from all
foreign domination than with particular political problems. And in
spite of the movement of events since that day, he remains essentially
at that stage, being closer in spirit to the nationalists of the
European irredentist type than to the spirit of contemporary young
China. A convinced republican, he nevertheless measures events and men
in the concrete by what he thinks they will do to promote the
independence of China from foreign control, rather than by what they
will do to promote a truly democratic government. This is the sole
explanation that can be given for his unfortunate coquetting a year
ago with the leaders of the now