On October 9, 1911, a follower of Sun Yat-sen, one of the heroic and desperate "Dare-to-dies" who had harassed the imperial government for years, was working over a bomb in the Russian concession in the upriver port of Hankow. The bomb exploded accidentally; the secret storage of munitions was discovered; the next day, in the ensuing turmoil, the Republic of China was born. Double Ten Day (October 10, 1911) has since been celebrated as the Chinese Fourth of July. When the imperial officials sought to suppress the insurrection, they uncovered a conspiracy in the ranks of their own troops; in self-protection the troops revolted. In the next two months the Manchu Empire crumbled away. Sun Yat-sen, who was in Chicago at the time of the outbreak,[1] could trust his organization. Sure that destiny was working with him, he took his leisure in returning to China and stopped in London to forestall financial aid to the collapsing Empire. _The Presidency of Sun Yat-sen and the Republican Revolution_ The fall of the Empire was not the result of a great mass movement agitating the whole population; it developed from the revolutionary nucleus which Sun and his followers had built up to secure power. They had hammered away at the imperial regime by instigating mutiny and terror for many years, since they realized that the incompetence of the government was matched only by its impotence. The revolution itself was a chain of rebellions, occurring province by province under the leadership of revolutionaries or officials joining the revolution. Except for the massacre of Manchus in some of the cities, it was a nearly bloodless revolution. However, the various groups pushed in different directions, and different men tried to seize power. The constitutional monarchists compelled the throne to issue a very liberal constitution, which might be accepted by the populace in place of the Republican programs. Military men began to come to the fore, as the army units alone were in a position of unchallengeable power. Men who had no thought of revolution might join it in time to become leaders of the revolutionary-military juntas. Li Yüan-hung, an officer of the Empire, hid under his bed when revolutionary soldiers sought him out; given the choice between death and adherence to the revolutionaries, he sided with the new powers, and in a short while became the commanding officer of the revolutionary forces in the Wu-han cities. Similar instances were not uncommon.