turbulent, stubborn twentieth division, shorn of its commander, Chang, far to the eastward. The majority of the National Assembly had fled, and the Manchu princes would not come out of their bedrooms. If the rebels were to win now, they must produce even a stronger man than Yuan. Who was that man; where was he in the making? It is quite orthodox not to despair ever of immemorial China, and to expect a great man to arise when politics is at its worst, for Confucius arose from the rivalry of sixteen states, and he formulated his political philosophy when he was a persecuted exile from his own state of Lu. When the republicans were most dejected, that great republican, the American Methodist bishop, J. W. Bashford, of Shanghai, in season and out of season, unofficially beseeched them to quit themselves like men. So large-hearted a man could not stand by and see men who were fighting for liberty droop at their guns. He cheered them; he talked to their students; he gave megaphone interviews to the world press and supported the discouraged propaganda, fearing naught the criticism which arose. He was a missionary, but more than that, he was a man, and an American. Some British missionaries, too, came in for criticism because they could not refrain from whispering in the ear of liberty the Cromwellian encouragement: “Be of good cheer.” By November 29th the lack of money was thinning the lines of the rebel forces, and Dictator Yuan, at Peking, was growing in strength with small foreign loans and arms from Russia, Japan and Germany. The rebels, at Wu Ting Fang’s suggestion, in desperation, threatened to boycott the commerce of any nation making loans to the Manchu government, and a German compradore was shot down at Hankau as he was in the act of delivering arms over to the imperialists. The Manchu Tsai princes sold their art treasures for arms. The rebels melted the idols of the nation to make coin. In accord with the protocol of 1901, America now formally offered the Peking government 2,500 troops to assist in keeping the railway from Peking to Tientsin open to the sea. The Japanese had already landed their quota of this foreign force. Naturally the rebels looked on this landing of foreign troops in the Manchu section of the country as, to a degree, foreign aid to the Manchus, as it increased their prestige and sources of advice in the north. More subtle forces than those of arms began to work now on some of the rebel leaders, and the cause lapsed into darker days because of the lack of money. Dictator Yuan, in Peking, was exultant, and said to one member of the legations: “I give the rebellion eight more days to live; I expect to have 100,000 modern troops and a railway.” Professor E. H. Parker, the eminent sinologue, now of Manchester University, England, when a British consul in Korea, wrote of “Yuan’s Machiavellian character” in his book, _John Chinaman_. Even some of the Manchus