characteristic of the man that he should have been so bluntly cynical.
Though the Provisional Nanking Constitution, which was the "law" of
China so far as there was any law at all, had laid down specifically in
article XIX that all measures affecting the National Treasury must
receive the assent of Parliament, Yuan Shih-kai, pretending that the
small Advisory Council which had assisted him during the previous year
and which had only just been dissolved, had sanctioned a foreign loan,
peremptorily ordered the signature of the great Reorganization Loan of
£25,000,000 which had been secretly under negotiation all winter with
the financial agents of six Powers[8], although the rupture which had
come in the previous June as a forerunner to the Crisp loan had caused
the general public to lose sight of the supreme importance of the
financial factor. Parliament, seeing that apart from the possibility of
a Foreign Debt Commission being created something after the Turkish and
Egyptian models, a direct challenge to its existence had been offered,
raged and stormed and did its utmost to delay the question; but the
Chief Executive having made up his mind shut himself up in his Palace
and absolutely refused to see any Parliamentary representatives.
Although the Minister of Finance himself hesitated to complete the
transaction in the face of the rising storm and actually fled the
capital, he was brought back by special train and forced to complete the
agreement. At four o'clock in the morning on the 25th April the last
documents were signed in the building of a foreign bank and the Finance
Minister, galloping his carriage suddenly out of the compound to avoid
possible bombs, reported to his master that at last--in spite of the
nominal foreign control which was to govern the disbursement--a vast sum
was at his disposal to further his own ends.

Safe in the knowledge that possession is nine points of the law, Yuan
Shih-kai now treated with derision the resolutions which Parliament