Sunyacius’ headquarters have been at British Singapore and at Hongkong,
but he is as well known at San Francisco, Chicago, New York, London,
Vancouver and Yokohama. He has walked into dormitories of Columbia
College, New York, and talked revolution and reform with some of the
students under the unconscious eye of so prominent a conservative as
President Butler. One of his student protégés was Wellington Koo, now
the Chinese secretary to Yuan Shih Kai. Sunyacius is a thorough-going
scholar, propagandist, organizer and republican, like the book he
carried, a man of “Progress and Poverty”. The world’s great bankers,
especially two London firms long connected with Chinese progress,
knew him, his disguises as a salesman, etc., and his careful plans
of government and finance, and he has not been timid in America, or
in London, Hongkong and the Straits Settlements in asking for loans
for his propaganda and revolution. He has handled a million dollars
honestly, and lived most frugally. The greatest luxury he ever allowed
himself was a “Prince Albert” coat and a rose-bouttonière, but that was
so that he might appear acceptably before an audience of Occidentals!
When in Singapore, Doctor Sun had his picture taken in white ducks
and a topey hat, so that he is a modern in tonsorial as well as other
matters! “This conference must be secret and our correspondence must
be anonymous, and upon receipt, burned,” said Sun to the bankers.
“Why?” they asked. “Because I am shadowed night and day. Look across
the way when I suddenly lift the curtain.” He raised the curtain, and
the bankers saw two “sleuths” in the cowardly shadow, one of them a
Chinese, lurking in a recess of a money capital of the Occident, many
thousand miles from the Manchu cabal in Peking, who had Oriental and
Occidental detective agencies in their blacklisting pay.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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