The aim and difficulty of the rebels was to maintain the new ideas against reverses in the provinces, which had developed few modern thinkers among the officials, who, like the troops, were looking for salary first and country afterward. Yuan, the premier-dictator, who had weighed it all up in Honan, said to himself, according to some southern critics: “Give me money enough for 100,000 splendid, modern-drilled northern men, and give me trunk railways. I’ll find men who will fight for whichever side pays their wages; we must have order, which is civilization’s first law.” Yuan was a believer in that truism that the radical reformers do all the work, and bear all the risk of reform, and that the “standpatters”, the moderate progressives and reactionaries, enjoy all the fruit and political offices. Differently from Sun, Yuan wanted office first and influence afterward. He was now active in soliciting foreign loans, securing $1,000,000 from Russia and Belgium, and the promise of $30,000,000 from Russia, Belgium and Japan, these being the pro-Manchu powers, while America and Britain represented pro-Chinese sympathies. The rebels were just as active in soliciting private subscriptions in America and the Straits Settlements, and 70 per cent. of the Chinese abroad sent a quarter of their fortunes to Sun Yat Sen and Wu Ting Fang at Shanghai for the republican cause. However, it must be admitted that when the Manchus recruited Yuan Shih Kai, the Honanese, they secured a tower of strength, another Li Hung Chang, to a large degree a dictator, a believer in money, troops, quick trial by drumhead, and decapitation, a good servant of any master who would steadily employ him; a believer in dynasties more than peoples, a modern progressive but not an idealist or natural republican, a man who hated the words “turbulent liberty”, but who loved the word “order”; a statesman more like Diaz, Bismarck or Richelieu than like Washington or Lincoln. He had never traveled abroad like thousands of other Chinese officials. He could not speak or read English, and so knew little of the great documents of liberty and idealism in their first fire of the original. He knew that he was smashing rapid progress for the second time, just as he had gone against the reform Manchu emperor, Kwang Hsu, and the palace reformers from Canton: Kang Yu Wei, Liang Chi Choa, etc., in 1898, and joined the reactionary “Boxer” dowager empress, Tse Hsi. He feared the rebel sympathizers might assassinate him, and he rode as dictator about Peking with a cavalry escort. His headquarters were in the modern Wai Wu Pu Building, which is fitted with steam heat, elevators, electric light, etc. There he gave regular interviews to the foreign press representatives, in emulation of the methods long practised by Sunyacius and Wu Ting Fang at Shanghai. He made the Manchus weak, too, for he matched their troops at Peking with his old Shangtung and Honan territorial troops, man for man. He also sent the