continually reported to him the true state of affairs and bade him
bide his time. Certain it is that the firing of the first shots on
the Yangtsze found him alert and issuing private orders to his
followers. It was inevitable that he should have been recalled to
office--and actually within one hundred hours of the first news of
the outbreak the Court sent for him urgently and ungraciously.

From the 14th October, 1911, when he was appointed by Imperial
Edict Viceroy of Hupeh and Hunan and ordered to proceed at once to
the front to quell the insurrection, until the 1st November, when
he was given virtually Supreme Power as President of the Grand
Council in place of Prince Ching, a whole volume is required to
discuss adequately the maze of questions involved. For the
purposes of this account, however, the matter can be dismissed
very briefly in this way. Welcoming the opportunity which had at
last come and determined once for all to settle matters
decisively, so far as he was personally concerned, Yuan Shih-kai
deliberately followed the policy of holding back and delaying
everything until the very incapacity marking both sides--the
Revolutionists quite as much as the Manchus--forced him, as man of
action and man of diplomacy, to be acclaimed the sole mediator and
saviour of the nation.

The detailed course of the Revolution, and the peculiar manner in
which Yuan Shih-kai allowed events rather than men to assert their
mastery has often been related and need not long detain us. It is
generally conceded that in spite of the bravery of the raw
revolutionary levies, their capacity was entirely unequal to the
trump card Yuan Shih-kai held all the while in his hand--the six
fully-equipped Divisions of Field Troops he himself had organized