Another strain of the ancient thought penetrates Sun Yat-sen’s theories. Ideological control was not to the Confucians, as some Marxian critics aver,(55) a rather naïve duplicity by which the gentry of China could maintain themselves in power indefinitely. Confucius can not be accused, save on the basis of unwarrantable reading-in, of insincerity in his teaching of order. He was conservative, and knew what he was doing, in seeking for the general self-discipline of men, and the rule of precept and virtue; but to believe that he desired one public philosophy and another private one goes beyond the realm of historically justifiable interpretation. An ideology may, of course, be deceptive to its promulgators, but the absence of any genuine class-society—as known in the West—must serve as a testimonial to the sincerity of Confucian teachings. The Confucian ideology was to the ancients not only an instrument for good; it was common sense. Sun Yat-sen did not, as a Western leader in his position might have done, seek to befuddle the masses for their own good. Since he proposed to entrust China’s destinies to the votes of the masses, he could scarcely have believed them liable to fall victims to deceit over a great length of time. In teaching of the race-nation, and of the nature of Chinese society, Sun Yat-sen was telling the people what it would be good for them to believe; it was good for them because it was the truth—that is, most in accord with the actual situation of China in the general society of the world. Few today would dare say what is really in the minds of European leaders such as Stalin, Mussolini, and Hitler. These men may themselves believe what they say; or, not believing it, say it nevertheless because they think it the right thing for the masses, in the masses’ own interests, to believe. Their respective enemies accuse them of saying what they do in order to mislead the masses and to dominate the masses for hidden purposes of their own. No such accusation has been levelled against Sun Yat-sen. Apart from his personal sincerity, his belief in the qualities of the common people was such that he did not consider it necessary to deceive them, even for their own good. Consequently, in dealing with the various doctrines that Sun preached, it must be remembered that he himself believed what he was saying. He did not merely think that the people should regard the Chinese society as a race-nation; he thought that China _was_ a race-nation. The modifications of the Confucian philosophy were to be contemplated, as was the original philosophy, as pragmatically true.(56) These two factors must be reckoned with—that Sun Yat-sen was teaching and working in the Chinese milieu, and that his ideology was an ideology not in the older pejorative sense of the word, which connoted duplicity, but an ideology in the sense of a scheme of exact knowledge which, by its very truthfulness, was a political and social instrument.