As early as November, 1915, Yuan Shih-kai and his immediate henchmen had indeed realized the internal advantages to be derived from a formal war-partnership with the signatories of the Pact of London, the impulse to the movement being given by certain important shipments of arms and ammunition from China which were then made. A half-surreptitious attempt to discuss terms in Peking caused no little excitement, the matter being, however, only debated in very general terms. The principal item proposed by the Peking government was characteristically the stipulation that an immediate loan of two million pounds should be made to China, in return for her technical belligerency. But when the proposal was taken to Tokio, Japan rightly saw that its main purpose was simply to secure an indirect foreign endorsement of Yuan Shih-kai's candidature as Emperor; and for that reason she threw cold-water on the whole project. To subscribe to a formula, which besides enthroning Yuan Shih-kai would have been a grievous blow to her Continental ambitions, was an unthinkable thing; and therefore the manoeuvre was foredoomed to failure. The death of Yuan Shih-kai in the Summer of 1916 radically altered the situation. Powerful influences were again set to work to stamp out the German cult and to incline the minority of educated men who control the destinies of the country to see that their real interests could only lie with the Allies, who were beginning to export Chinese man-power as an auxiliary war-aid and who were very anxious to place the whole matter on a sounder footing. Little real progress was, however, made in the face of the renewed German efforts to swamp the country with their propaganda. By means of war-maps, printed in English and Chinese, and also by means of an exhaustive daily telegraphic service which hammered home every possible fact illustrative of German invincibility, the German position in China, so far from being weakened, was actually strengthened during the period when Rumania was being overrun. By a singular destiny, any one advocating an alliance with the Allies was bitterly attacked not only by the Germans but by the Japanese as well--this somewhat naive identification of Japan's political interest with those of an enemy country being an unique feature of the situation worthy of permanent record.