And although the issue of the Revolution remains still in doubt, one was at the start of the Conference in a better position to realise the nature and strength of its motive forces. Clearly this Revolutionary movement in China was not inspired solely or even mainly by the desire to press through a reform, too long delayed, of the corrupt Chinese Government. Nor was the general cry that the Manchus must be eliminated due solely or even mainly to a well-grounded disbelief in {194} the will or the power of the Tartar Dynasty to break with its tradition of misrule. The movement, which had spread like wildfire throughout the length of China, from the province of Chihli in the extreme north to that of Kwangtung in the extreme south, was clearly a national uprising of the Chinese against what was regarded as a degrading foreign domination. It had borrowed the political cries of the Liberal West; it had clothed itself, in those centres where it was victoriously established, with the forms of republican government; but its dynamic force was derived, at least among the ignorant masses, for whom constitutional government was a meaningless phrase, from the traditional feelings of a people which had for three hundred years past been restive under the Tartar yoke. Nothing could show this more clearly than what had everywhere been the first act of emancipation--the cutting of the queue, for the shaven head and queue were imposed in the seventeenth century upon the Chinese as a symbol of subjection by the conquering Manchus. Everywhere people had, from the start of the Revolution, been taking off their queues, and, although an Imperial edict had made it optional for the people to discard or retain them, the Imperialists had killed hundreds of peaceable folk merely because they were found without their queues. The rebellion thus took its place in a series of national uprisings against the Tartar rulers, and it was, as will be seen in the later portion of this volume, not without significance that it gained its most conspicuous initial successes precisely in those maritime provinces in which the appearance of the dispossessed Chinese Ming Dynasty held out longest against the Manchu usurpers. If the movement had taken on fresh forms, said a writer in a London journal, this was due to the exigencies of changed conditions. The Kwangsi rebels in 1850 set up as Emperor, with the name of Tien-te ("heavenly virtue") a youth said to be the representative of the {195} last Ming Dynasty. The movement languished until the redoubtable Hung Siu-tsuan swept the Pretender aside, courted foreign favours by declaring himself a Christian, and, after capturing Wuchang and Nanking, proclaimed himself the first Emperor of the Taiping Dynasty as Tien Wang ("heavenly king"). His hideous atrocities, continued the writer quoted, and a too fantastic description of the physical attributes of the deity--the outcome of a