In considering the principles of Sun more than a decade after they were pronounced, one cannot permit one’s own knowledge of the events of the last eleven years to make one demand of Sun Yat-sen a similar background. That would amount to requiring that he be a prophet. At the time when he spoke of the excellence of Russia he had no reason to question the good faith of the Communists who were helping him. It is conceivable that even the Bolsheviks who were aiding and advising the Nationalists did not realize how soon the parting of the ways would come, how much the two ideologies differed from one another, how much each of the two parties endangered the other’s position. At the time Sun spoke, the Communists were his allies in the struggle against imperialism; they had agreed from the beginning that China was a country not suited to communism; and Sun Yat-sen, relying on them not to use him in some wider policy of theirs, had no cause to mistrust or fear them. What has happened since is history. Sun Yat-sen can scarcely be required to have predicted it. His comments on imperialism, therefore, must be accepted at face value in a consideration of the nationalist program in his theories. The method by means of which Sun reconciled his denial of the superiority of class to nation is an interesting one, profoundly significant as a clue to the understanding of his thought. He estimates the population of the world at 1500 million. Now, of this total 400 million are members of the white race, who constitute the most powerful and prosperous people in the modern world. “This white race regards (its 400,000,000 representatives) as the unit which must swallow up the other, colored races. Thus the Red tribes of America have already been exterminated.... The Yellow Asiatic race is now oppressed by the Whites, and it is possible that it will be exterminated before long.”(257) Thus, as Sun viewed it, imperialism before the war was racial as well as economic. The White Peril was a reality. This emphasis on the doctrine of race shows the emphasis that Sun put upon race once he had narrowed down the old world-society to the Chinese race-nation. The most vigorous _Rassenpolitiker_, such as Homer Lea or Lothrop Stoddard,(258) would approve heartily of such a system of calculation in politics. Sun Yat-sen differed with them, as he differed with the Marxians, and with the race-theorists in general, by not following any one Western absolute to the bitter end, whether it was the class war or the race struggle.