Such was the man who may become yet the greatest man among the Chinese in his own country as he has been out of it. In due course Dr. Sun Yat-sen was proclaimed President, with a provisional Government at Nanking. Sun Yat-sen, revolutionist in the most conservative land under heaven, fugitive for fifteen years from the keenest and most relentless trailers of men, hidden spirit of strange secret societies whose ramifications have made mole tracks through every land where Chinamen are--this man is now President of the Republic of China by decree of the Provisional Military Assembly at Nanking. Out of the underground passages of plot and intrigue the nature of which no Occidental could hope to understand, and through which this wiry little man has been wriggling and back tracking for more than a dozen years, a new national figure suddenly jumps to command the attention of the world. During years past the world has occasionally caught glimpses of the round black head and narrow, ascetic features of this Dr. Sun, {211} now in Singapore, now in London, now in San Francisco. There had been little paragraphs in the world's news about an agitator, a Radical, who seemed to be tilting with straws at the impregnable citadel of the Manchu clan in Peking. The Revolution began in China and even then, when the name of Sun Yat-sen was coupled with it people outside of China cracked jokes about a faker, a charlatan, who was trying to capitalise the upheaval at home for his own benefit. Then over night things happened in China. The next morning the world learned at its breakfast-table that out of the welter and uproar of revolution in old China a leader had arisen to gird an ancient land under new harness of government. And it also became manifest that the Revolution, which had started by concerted movements in the heart of China and spread with the rapidity of a powder-train, and the little man who had been dodging and twisting through the world for so many years were closely related--extraordinarily so. Sun Yat-sen started many revolutions. Each was stronger than the last; each achieved a little more. The final one, striven for and plotted through channels not yet known, has succeeded. Sun Yat-sen was the man of the hour in China. An odd circumstance that brings an added thrill of romance into the story of his life is that though President of united China he still bears upon his head a price totalling about 700,000 taels. The rewards for his head offered by provincial governments and the central authorities in Peking during the last fifteen years have not been recalled, even though payment upon delivery might be doubtful. Yet the fact that his head was worth hundreds of "shoes" of silver during all the latter years of his activity has been one of the lightest burdens that Dr. Sun has carried about on his narrow shoulders. He {212} took long chances, apparently he suffered many close calls from death, but he persisted.