228 REVIEWS OF RECENT BOOKS 



"educated" persons of whom not a few have assimilated the pharisaism 

 which blights a nation. 



With the author's scornful strictures on this froth and on the 

 administration of the Republic one must perforce agree though we 

 doubt whether the trading classes have any desire to see the empire 

 restored. We must further insist that but for the absolute rottenness 

 of the government under Mr. Bland's idol, the Dowager, the revolution 

 would never have succeeded, and that Yuan Shih-kai failed because he 

 adopted the seclusion of the weakest emperors and so lost touch with 

 public opinion, becoming in effect the slave of his immediate entourage. 



A government that pursues the phantom of recovering sovereign 

 rights while neglecting the fulfilment of obvious sovereign duties as 

 well to its people as to the foreigner within its gates "climbs a tree 

 to catch fish." This China would have learned by bitter experience 

 but for the persistent glamour that envelopes home views about her and 

 facilitates the bamboozling speeches of her envoys, Chinese and alien. 



China is a land of promise and of paper reforms. Even our 

 author's shrewdness does not always detect the sham in certain projects. 

 What could sound more promising than a reformed currency issuing, 

 from a modern mint at Shanghai? and what more patriotic than the 

 provisions of the necessary funds by an association of Chinese banks 

 which thus obviates recourse to the Consortium which was to be the 

 foreign instrument of China's regeneration ? But meanwhile Sun Yat-sen 

 and his general attack Kwangsi, though his own treasury is empty 

 and his province recently bled white, Hunan threatens Hupei, Chekiang. 

 sets up for itself, famine has to be financed by extra duty sanctioned 

 through the rivalry of foreign states and Peking's authority is jeered 

 at as the servant of the northern militarists : unpaid troops are a per- 

 petual menace, and copper coins in excess, and debased at that, rob 

 the poorer classes. 



Mr. Bland recognizes the plague of tuchiin armies and is urgent for 

 a genuine disarmament. He omits, however, to indicate how the cat 

 is to be belled — that is, where disarmament is to begin and what force^ 

 is to see that it is effectual. Disarmament has a soothing sound in the 

 world to-day, but in China it would mean a ticklish job. It could not 

 be left to each tuchiin nor to any but an adequate military force that 

 must unfortunately be foreign and to be just it should be simultaneous ! 

 In fact disarmament presents as many difficulties as morphia and opium,, 

 difficulties not lessened by a tendency to divert energies to loan con- 

 solidation, trademarks, the Anglo-Japanese alliance and the like showy 

 subjects. 



And yet even such persistent good luck as events have given China 

 cannot last for ever. Mr. Bland boasts that all his surmises as to 



