wo forces that numbered 18,000 armed men--were
taking every possible precaution.

In spite of these assurances great uneasiness was felt. The foreign
Legations, which are very imperfectly informed regarding Chinese affairs
although living in the midst of them, could not be convinced that
internal peace could be so suddenly attained after five years of such
fierce rivalries. Among the many gloomy predictions made at the time,
the most common to fall from the lips of Foreign Plenipotentiaries was
the remark that the Japanese would be in full occupation of the country
within three months--the one effective barrier to their advance having
been removed. No better illustration could be given of the inadequate
grasp of politics possessed by those whose peculiar business it should
be to become expert in the science of cause and effect. In China, as in
the Balkans, professional diplomacy errs so constantly because it has
in the main neither the desire nor the training to study dispassionately
from day to day all those complex phenomena which go to make up modern
nationalism. Guided in its conduct almost entirely by a policy of
personal predilections, which is fitfully reinforced by the recollection
of precedents, it is small wonder if such mountains of mistakes choke
every Legation dossier. Determined to have nothing whatever to do, save
in the last resort, with anything that savours of Radicalism, and
inclining naturally towards ideals which have long been abandoned in the
workaday world, diplomacy is the instinctive lover of obscurantism and
the furtive enemy of progress. Distrusting all those generous movements
which spring from the popular desire to benefit by change, it follows
from this that the diplomatic brotherhood inclines towards those truly
detestable things--secret compacts. In the present instance, having been
bitterly disappointed by the complete collapse of the strong man theory,
it was only natural that consolation should be sought by casting doubt
on the future. Never have sensible men been so absurd. The life-story of
Yuan Shih-kai, and the part European and Japanese diplomacy played in
that story, form a chapter which should be taught as a warning to all
who enter politics as a career, since there is exhibited in this history
a complete compendium of all the more vicious traits of Byzantinism.

The first acts of President Li Yuan-hung rapidly restored confidence and
advertised to the keen-eyed that the end of