The scheme now adopted by the Senate was to cause the provinces to flood Peking with petitions, sent up through the agency of "The Society for the Preservation of Peace," demanding that the Republic be replaced by that form of government which the people alone understood, the name Constitutional Monarchy being selected merely as a piece of political window-dressing to please the foreign world. A vast amount of organizing had to be done behind the scenes before the preliminaries were completed: but on the 6th October the scheme was so far advanced that in response to "hosts of petitions" the Senate, sitting in its capacity of Legislative Chamber (Li Fa Yuan) passed a so-called King-making bill in which elaborate regulations were adopted for referring the question under discussion to a provincial referendum. According to this naive document the provinces were to be organized into electoral colleges, and the votes of the electors, after being recorded, were to be sent up to Peking for scrutiny. Some attempt was made to follow Dr. Goodnow's advice to secure as far as possible that the various classes of the community should be specially represented: and provision was therefore made in the voting for the inclusion of "learned scholars," Chambers of Commerce, and "oversea merchants," whose votes were to be directly recorded by their special delegates. To secure uniformly satisfactory results, the whole election was placed absolutely and without restriction in the hands of the high provincial authorities, who were invited to bestow on the matter their most earnest attention. In a Mandate, issued in response to this Bill, Yuan Shih-kai merely limits himself to handing over the control of the elections and voting to the local authorities, safe in the knowledge that every detail of the plot had been carefully worked out in advance. By this time the fact that a serious and dangerous movement was being actively pushed had been well-impressed on the Peking Legations, and some anxiety was publicly manifested. It was known that Japan, as the active enemy of Yuan Shih-kai, could not remain permanently silent: and on the 28th October in association with Great Britain and Russia, she indeed made official inquiries at the Chinese Foreign Office regarding the meaning of the movement. She was careful, however, to declare that it was her solicitude for the general peace that alone dictated her action. [Footnote: A very remarkable illustration of the manner in which Yuan Shih-kai was trapped by official Japan during the monarchist movement has recently been extensively quoted in the Far Eastern press. Here is the substance of a Japanese (vernacular) newspaper account showing the uses to which Japanese politicians put the Press: