These were the days when in half the provincial capitals of China the Manchus that had ruled during nearly three centuries were hunted to their death, men and women alike, like vermin. Bloody heads decorated the lamp posts that had been erected in the Western fashion beside freshly macadamized streets. Slaughter, as in other dramatic moments in Oriental history, had become a pastime. Palaces and wealthy homes in a hundred cities were looted and burned, and a vast new traffic started up in the silks and paintings and pottery and objects of art suddenly thrown into the market.... Hankow had been taken by the imperial troops, but was to be recaptured as a charred, gutted ruin. General Li Yuan-hung was now “president of the Republic of China,” up at Wu Chang, by right of military organization and popular acclaim. Admiral Sah, of the Imperial Navy, was about to witness the unanimous mutiny of his fleet. The great Yuan Shi-K'ai, himself a Chinese born, was in command of the imperial troops while negotiating on either hand with the frantic throne and the upsurging revolutionists. At Peking heads were falling and great princes were fleeing or hiding pitifully within the walls of the legations.... Within a few weeks Sun Yat Sen was to leave London on his long journey eastward by way of Suez and Singapore, but without the enormous golden treasure so confidently expected by the revolutionists. Before his arrival, even, he was to be elected president of the new China, in the recently captured Nanking--where a National Assembly in cropped heads and frock coats already would be grinding out fresh tangles of legislation.... The event was outrunning the mental capacity of man. What was now tragic confusion would grow through the swift-following years into tragic chaos, as the most numerous and most nearly inert of peoples struggled out of the sluggish habit of centuries toward the dubious light of modernity.