Sun Yat-sen was emphatic about the necessity of a period of tutelage. The dismal farce of the first Republic in 1912, when the inexperience and apathy of the people, coupled with the venality of the militarists and politicians, very nearly discredited Chinese democracy, convinced Sun Yat-sen that effective self-government could be built up only as the citizens became ready for it. A considerable number of the disputes concerning the theory of self-government to be employed by the policy-making groups of the National (Kuomintang-controlled) Government have centered on the point of criteria for self-government. Even with the insertion of a transition stage, and with a certain amount of tutelage, difficulties are being encountered in the application of this theory of the introduction of constitutional government as soon as the people in a _hsien_ are prepared for it. Other considerations, military or political, may make any venture beyond the secure confines of a benevolent Party despotism dangerous; and the efficacy of tutelage can always be questioned. The period of tutelage was set for 1930-1935; it is possible, however, that the three stages cannot be gone through as quickly as possible, since the Japanese invasions and the world economic depression exercised a thoroughly disturbing influence throughout the country. A final point may be made with regard to the three stages of the revolution as Sun Yat-sen planned them. Always impetuous and optimistic in revolutionary endeavor, Sun Yat-sen expected that the military conquest would be rapid, the period of tutelage continue a few years, and constitutional democracy endure for ages, until in the end _ta t’ung_ should reign upon earth. The transition period was not, as in the theory of the Confucians and the Marxians, an indefinite period beginning with the present and leading on down to the age of the near-perfection of humanity. It was to Sun Yat-sen, in his more concrete plans, an interval between the anarchy and tyranny of the warlord dictatorships and the coming of Nationalist democracy. It was not a scheme of government in itself. To recapitulate: Sun Yat-sen believed that revolution proceeded or should proceed by three stages—the (military) revolution proper; the period of tutelage; and the period of constitutional democracy. His theory resembles the Communist, although it provides for a dictatorship of the patriotic elite (Kuomintang) and not of any one class such as the proletariat; it also resembles the Confucian with respect to the concepts of tutelage and eventual harmony. Military conquest was to yield swiftly to tutelage; tutelage was to lead, _hsien_ by _hsien_, into democracy. With the establishment of democracy in more than one-half of the provinces, constitutional government was to be inaugurated and the expedient of Party dictatorship dispensed with.