foreign loans of the Japanese war, loans made necessary because the
Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of the only _raison
d'être_ of Peking sovereignty, _i.e._ the old-time military power. The
story is, therefore, clear and well-connected and so logical in its
results that it has about it a finality suggesting the unrolling of the
inevitable.

During the Revolution the one decisive factor was shown to be almost at
once--money, nothing but money. The pinch was felt at the end of the
first thirty days. Provincial remittances ceased; the Boxer quotas
remained unpaid; a foreign embargo was laid upon the Customs funds. The
Northern troops, raised and trained by Yuan Shih-kai, when he was
Viceroy of the Metropolitan province, were, it is true, proving
themselves the masters of the Yangtsze and South China troops; yet that
circumstance was meaningless. Those troops were fighting for what had
already proved itself a lost cause--the Peking System, as well as the
Manchu dynasty. The fight turned more and more into a money-fight. It
was foreign money which brought about the first truce and the transfer
of the so-called republican government from Nanking to Peking. In the
strictest sense of the words every phase of the settlement then arrived
at was a settlement in terms of cash.[5]

Had means existed for rapidly replenishing the Chinese Treasury without
having recourse to European stockmarkets (whose actions are
semi-officially controlled when distant regions are involved) the
Republic might have fared better. But placed almost at once through
foreign dictation under a species of police-control, which while
nominally derived from Western conceptions, was primarily designed to
rehabilitate the semblance of the authority which had been so
sensationally extinguished, the Republic remained only a dream; and the