The Vice-President being a man of courtesy, good nature, benevolence and wisdom, will certainly be capable of greatly lessening the difficulties of the day and place the country on the foundation of peace, and so remedy the defects of me, the Great President, and satisfy the expectations of the people of the whole country. The civil and military officials outside of the Capital as well as the troops, police and scholars and people should doubly keep in mind the difficulties and perils of the nation, and endeavour to maintain peace and order to the best of their ability, placing before everything else the welfare of the country. The ancients once said: "It is only when the living do try to become strong that the dead are not dead." This is also the wish of me, the Great President. (Signed) TUAN CHI-JUI, Secretary of State and Minister of War, TSAO JU-LIN, Minister of Foreign Affairs and Communications. WANG YI-TANG, Minister of Interior. CHOW TZU-CHI, Minister of Finance. LIU-KUAN-HSIUNG, Minister of Navy. CHANG TSUNG-HSIANG, Minister of Justice and Agriculture and Commerce. CHANG KUO-KAN, Minister of Education. 6th day of the 6th month of the 5th year of Chung Hua Min Kuo. This tragic denouement did not fail to awaken within very few days among thinking minds a feeling of profound sympathy for the dead man coupled with sharp disgust for the part that foreigners had played--not all, of course--but a great number of them. Briefly, when all the facts are properly grouped it can be said that Yuan Shih-kai was killed by his foreign friends--by the sort of advice he has been consistently given in Constitutional Law, in Finance, in Politics, in Diplomacy. It is easy to trace step by step the broad road he had been tempted to travel, and to see how at each turning-point the men who should have taught him how to be true and loyal to the Western things the country had nominally adhered to from the proclamation of the Republic, showed him how to be disloyal and untrue. The tragedy is one which is bound to be deeply studied throughout the whole world when the facts are properly known and there is time to think about them, and if there is anything today left to poetic justice the West will know to whom to apportion the blame.