the foreign powers refused to let his government at Canton exercise even the limited authority permitted the Chinese by the treaties over their own customs service, and did not let Sun take the surplus funds allowed the Chinese (after payment of interest due on the money they had lent various Chinese governments), his appreciation of the active propagation of nationalism was heightened. He realized that the Chinese had to fight their own battles, and that, while they might find individual friends among the Westerners, they could scarcely hope for a policy of the great powers which would actually foster the growth of the new national China.(246) Simultaneously, he found his advocacy of a nationalist program receiving unexpected support from the Soviet Union. His early contacts with the Russians, who were the only foreigners actually willing to intervene in his behalf with shipments of arms and money, made him interested in the doctrines lying behind their actions, so inconsistent with those of the other Western powers. In the Communist support of his nationalism as a stage in the struggle against imperialism, he found his third justification of a return, with full emphasis, to the program of nationalism. Hence, at the time that he delivered his sixteen lectures, which represent the final and most authoritative stage of his principles, and the one with which the present work is most concerned, he had returned to an advocacy of nationalism after a temporary hope that enough work had been done along that line. In expelling the alien Manchu rulers of China, he had hoped that the old Chinese nationalism might revive, as soon as it was free of the police restrictions had placed on race-national propaganda by the Empire. He had found that this suspension of a nationalist campaign was premature because nationalism had not firmly entrenched itself in the Chinese social mind. In the first place, state allegiance was weak; usurpers, dictators and military commandants strode about the Chinese countryside with personal armies at their heels. Secondly, the foreign powers, out of respect to whom, perhaps, a vigorous patriotic campaign had not been carried out, did not show themselves anxious to assist China—at least, not as anxious as Sun Yat-sen expected them to be. Third, the inspiration offered by a power which, although temporarily submerged, had recently been counted among the great powers of the world, and which had rejected the aggressive policy which the rest of the Western nations, to a greater or less degree, pursued in the Far East, was sufficient to convince Sun Yat-sen of the justice of the doctrines of that power. Soviet Russia did not stop with words; it offered to associate with China as an equal, and the Soviet representative in Peking was the first diplomat to be given the title of ambassador to China.