and what we have said in our opening sentences should now be
clear. The Chinese Revolution was an emotional rising against the
Peking System because it was a bad and inefficient and retrograde
system, just as much as against the Manchus, who after all had
adopted purely Chinese methods and who were no more foreigners
than Scotchmen or Irishmen are foreigners to-day in England. The
Revolution of 1911 derived its meaning and its value--as well as
its mandate--not from what it proclaimed, but for what it stood
for. Historically, 1911 was the lineal descendant of 1900, which
again was the offspring of the economic collapse advertised by the
great foreign loans of the Japanese war, loans made necessary
because the Taipings had disclosed the complete disappearance of
the only raison d'etre 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