The most important person among either princes or officials that has been connected with the new regime is Yuan Shih-kai. He was born in the province of Honan, that province south of the Yellow River which is almost annually flooded by that great muddy stream which is called "China's Sorrow." As a boy he was a diligent student of the Chinese classics and of such foreign books as had been translated into the Chinese language, but he has never studied a foreign tongue nor visited a foreign country. Here then rests the first element of his greatness--that without any knowledge of foreign language, foreign law, foreign literature, science of government, or the history of progress and of civilization, he has occupied the highest and most responsible positions in the gift of the empire, has steered the ship of state on a straight course between the shoals of conservatism on the one hand and radical reform on the other until he has brought her near to the harbour of a safe progressive policy. He has always been what the Chinese call the tu-ti or pupil of Li Hung-chang, and it may be that it was from him he learned his statecraft. Certain it is that he always basked in the favour of the great Viceroy, and it may be that he had more or less influence with him in his earlier appointments, for he rose rapidly and in spite of all other officials. On his return from Korea he was made a judge. He was then put in charge of the army of the metropolitan province, and with the assistance of German officers he succeeded in drilling 12,500 troops after the European fashion. It was about this time that the Emperor conceived the plan of instituting and carrying out one of the most stupendous reforms that has ever been undertaken in human government--that of transforming four thousand years of conservatism of four hundred millions of people in the short space of a few months. Given: A people who cannot make a nail, to build a railroad. Given: A people who dare not plow a deep furrow for fear of disturbing the spirits of the place, to open gold, silver, iron and coal mines. Given: A people who in 4,000 years did not have the genius to develop a decent high school, to open a university in the capital of every province. These are three of the score or more of equally difficult problems that the Emperor undertook to solve in twice as many days. In order to the solution of these problems there was organized in Peking a Reform Party of hot-headed, radical young scholars not one of whom has ever turned out to be a statesman. They were brilliant young men, many of them, but they so lost their heads in their enthusiasm for reform that they forgot that their government was in the hands of the same old conservative leaders under whom it had been for forty centuries.