The reader, if he knows China, will need no further explanation, for readily will he recognise my meaning. He will understand by experience what a mass of inconsistency and incongruity China and her people are. But to the Westerner who has never been into China nor rubbed shoulders closely with this peculiar people it will perhaps be necessary to add that life in China, in all its forms and phases, is fraught with such a truly remarkable atmosphere of the unexpected that to write on any Chinese man, woman, custom, habit, place, or thing one is able only to generalise--unless he goes into the tedium of particularising. To get into line it is necessary so to cut down and to prune and generally to reinterpret that when one has told his story there seems to be very little at all in it. But those who have lived in China know the conditions. They will have absorbed this incomprehensible spirit of the country, will understand what is written--and what is more important still, will magnetically feel what is left out which the writer on Chinese affairs would have said. When in writing upon men and things Chinese you think you have pruned down all apparent misinterpretation or misrepresentation, you find there is still a little pruning left to be done; you prune again, and in the end you find you often are, to the Western mind, misinterpreting and misrepresenting facts merely because you have left out that which, to you, with {15} your Chinese eyes, appeared untrue. You see a thing in China and you think that you understand it. You fix it in your mind and tell yourself that you have absorbed it, whatever it may be, and that you now have the final thought and word and correct meaning. But after a little time you find, by a peculiar process of Chinese national twisting and shifting, no matter what you see, hear, think, believe, your final thought and word and correct meaning are changed completely. This, perhaps, describes the political atmosphere during the Revolution. Into everything there came an exasperating suspense, a terrible tangle of all national affairs, as there still must be for a very long time to come. Therefore to the man who sets out to write a detailed history of China's Revolution, and correctly to diagnose the effect of one event upon another in a consecutive and truthful line, there at once appears a formidable task.