Democracy, although secondary in point of time to his theory, is of great importance in Sun’s plans for the political nature of the new China. He justified democracy because it was (1) an obligation laid upon modern China by the sages of antiquity; (2) a necessary consequence of nationalism, since nationalism was the self-rule of a free people, and democracy the effectuation of that self-rule, and democracy the effectuation of that self-rule; (3) the government of the modern age; China, along with the rest of the world, was drawn by the tide of progress into the age of democratic achievement; (4) the political form best calculated for the obtaining of good administration; and (5) a modernizing force that would stir and change the Chinese people so as to equip them for the competitions of the modern world. In the lecture in which he criticized the inadequacies of democracy as applied in the West, Sun Yat-sen made an interesting comment on the proletarian dictatorship which had recently been established in Russia. “Recently Russia invented another form of government. That government is not representative; it is _absolute popular government_. In what does that absolute popular government really consist? As we know very little about it, we cannot judge it aright, but we believe that this (absolute popular government) is _evidently much better than a representative government_.”(128) He went on immediately to say that the Three Principles were what China needed, and that the Chinese should not imitate the political systems advocated in Europe and America, but should adapt democracy in their own way. In view of his objection to a permanent class dictatorship, as opposed to a provisional party dictatorship, and the very enthusiastic advocacy of democracy represented by the arguments described above, it appears unlikely in the extreme that Sun Yat-sen, had he lived beyond 1925, would have abandoned his own plan of democracy for China in favor of “absolute popular government.” The phrase was, at the time, since Sun Yat-sen was seeking Russian assistance, expedient for a popular lecture. Its importance might easily be exaggerated. The Three Natural Classes of Men. Having in mind the extreme peril in which the Chinese race-nation stood, its importance in a world of Western or Western-type states, and seeing nationalism as the sole means of defending and preserving China, Sun Yat-sen demanded that the Chinese ideology be extended by the acquisition of knowledge. If this modernizing and, if a neologism be permitted, stateizing process were to succeed, it must needs be fostered by a well-prepared group of persons within the society.