This party had begun as a small group of the personal followers of Sun Yat-sen in the days when he was struggling against the Manchu monarchy almost singlehanded. Gradually this group increased and became a federation of the great secret orders which had resisted the Manchus for centuries. It developed into a modern parliamentary party under the name _Kuomintang_—literally _nation people party_—with the inauguration of the first republic, but was soon driven underground by the would-be emperor Yüan Shih-k’ai. It emerged again in South China at the end of the World War, was reorganized after the Communist model (so far as intra-party organization was concerned) before the death of Sun Yat-sen, led the revolution to the North, and, now, though somewhat less united than before, rules the greater part of China in the name of the Three Principles.(210) Confucius preached the slow transformation of society by means of an intellectual leaven, scholar class, which, by re-forming and clarifying the ideology, could gradually minimize conflict among men and bring about an epoch of concord in which all men would live by reason as found in tradition. The function of the Kuomintang was, in Sun’s mind, only remotely similar. The Kuomintang was designed to intervene in a chaos of wars and corrupt politics, to propagate the nationalist ideology, and avert a tragic fate which would otherwise be inevitable—the disappearance of China from the map of the world, and the extinction not only of Chinese civilization but—as Sun Yat-sen thought—of the Chinese race as well. In the days before the downfall of the monarchy, and for the few years of defeat under the first republic, the Kuomintang was not highly organized. Sun Yat-sen’s genius for leadership, and the fervor of his adherents—which can be understood only at first-hand, and cannot be explained in rational terms—were sufficient to hold the party together. But there was far too much discord as to final principles as well as to points of immediate action, and party activities were not so specialized as to permit maximum efficiency.(211) Furthermore, there was the question of the relations of the party and the state. It was somewhat absurd for the partizans of Sun Yat-sen, having brought about the revolution, to stand back and let whomever would walk away with it. The party’s power had ebbed with its success in 1911. There had to be some way of keeping the party in power after it had achieved the overthrow of its enemies, and won the revolutionary control of the country. Reorganization was definitely necessary if party effectiveness were to be raised to the point of guaranteeing the success of the next revolution—which Sun did not live to see—and party supremacy to the point of assuring the Nationalists control of the government after the revolution had been accomplished.