At Lhasa, in far-away Tibet, was an imperial resident who had been trained in reform at Shanghai and in law at Yale College, in America. He was the eminent Wen Tsung Yao, destined to be the assistant foreign minister of the first rebel government, and whose son (a West Point graduate) was slated to lead the most daring charges at Hankau and Nanking. Even in the home of the Manchus, at Mukden, Wu Yun Lien, a Chinese immigrant, president of the Manchuria Assembly, was filled with the doctrine and ready to declare for reform. Great viceroys, who had served China long in official positions under the Manchus, were ready to go over, but for the most part the radical reformers were new men, unknown to the world, as the Manchus had naturally never given office to them. Many causes, all important, helped to precipitate the crisis. Sheng Kung Pao and others at Peking, Tientsin and Hankau, both Chinese and Manchus whom foreigners know well, had, partly under foreign advice and Japan’s example, planned to compel the provinces and the gentry of the guilds to sell out their many little railroads, a number of which were paying well, to the central government, which intended to nationalize the railroads quickly under immense loans from the banking nations of the Occident and Japan. These loans meant to the local gentry the extinction of distributed small fortunes and opportunities; concessions of mines to foreigners, such as the immense gifts of franchises to the British “Peking Syndicate” in Shansi province, to the London and China syndicate in Hupeh province, to Belgian, German, French, Italian and other syndicates; heavy interest; continuation of the unscientific Likin system of customs as a security, and payment of obnoxious bonuses, as when Hupeh province, under Chang Chih Tung, in 1904, had to pay a bonus to buy back a Chinese railway concession; and in 1911, when China had to buy the bonds which represented by an excess payment of $3,750,000 a Chinese railroad which existed only on paper; and as Professor Ross points out in _The Changing Chinese_, when Shansi province had to pay a syndicate over two millions to relinquish an undeveloped concession in China which cost them almost nothing. The bitter complaint, _written in blood_, of the Hunanese of Changsha City on this subject is quoted in the New York _Railway-Age Gazette_ of October 13, 1911, and includes this sentence: “When a piece of meat is in the traitorous railway thief’s mouth, it is hard to take it out.” All may not agree with the Chinese position, but all should duly consider the Chinese side of the question as expressed in their words. “Peking has betrayed Wuchang,” cried the Hupeh men. There were many more instances from the Sungari to the Yangtze basins, yea, to the Mekong basin, through 2,500 miles of mine and men, traffic and trade, of the hard bargain driven by the foreign lender, generally under bad foreign advice.