In approaching Sun Yat-sen’s solution the Western student must again remember two quite important distinctions between the democracy of Sun Yat-sen and the democracy of the West. Sun Yat-sen’s principle of _min ch’üan_ was the self-control of the whole people first, and a government by the mass of individuals making up the people secondarily. The Chinese social system was well enough organized to permit the question of democracy to be a question of the nation as a whole, rather than a question of the reconciliation of particular interests within the nation. Special interests already found their outlet in the recognized social patterns—so reminiscent of the institutions envisaged by the pluralists—of the ancient order. In the second place, China was already a society which was highly organized socially, although politically in ruins; the democratic government that Sun Yat-sen planned had infinitely less governing to do than did Western governments. The new Nationalist government had to fit into rather than supplant the old order. As a consequence of these distinctions, one may expect to find much less emphasis on the exact methods of popular control of the government than one would in a similar Western plan; and one must anticipate meeting the ancient devices and offices which the usage of centuries had hallowed and made true to the Chinese. One may find that democracy in China is not so radical a novelty as it might at first thought be esteemed. A figure of speech, which somewhat anticipates the exposition, may serve to prepare one for some of the seeming omissions of Sun Yat-sen’s plan for a democracy. The suggestion is this: that the democracy of Sun Yat-sen is, roughly, a modernization of the old Imperial system, with the Emperor (as the head of the academic civil service) removed, and the majority placed in his stead. Neither in the old system nor in the new were the minorities the object of profound concern, for, to the Chinese, the notion of a minority (as against the greater mass of the tradition-following people) is an odd one. The rule of the Son of Heaven (so far as it was government at all) was to be replaced by the rule of the whole people (_min_, which is more similar to the German _Volk_ than the English _people_). The first Sun Yat-sen called monarchy; the second, democracy. The old ideology was to yield to the new, but even the new as a review of it has shown, was not broad enough completely to supplant the old. The essential continuity of Chinese civilization was not to be broken. Democracy as a Western institution could be nothing more than a sham, as the parliaments at Peking had showed; democracy in China had to be not only democracy, but Chinese as well.