It may begin to be apparent that, at least for Sun Yat-sen, the control of the race-nation by the ideology was not inconsistent with the political control of the race-nation by itself. In the interval between the old certainty and the new, political authority had to prevail. This authority was to be directed by the people but actually wielded by the geniuses of the revolution. The new ideology was to emerge from the progress of knowledge not, as before, among a special class of literary persons, but through all the people. It was to be an ideology based on practical experience and on the experimental method, and consequently, perhaps, less certain then the old Confucian ideology, which was in its foundations religious. To fill in the gaps where uniformity of thought and behavior, on the basis of truth, had not been established, the state was to act, and the state had to be responsible to the people. At this point it may be remembered that Sun Yat-sen was among the very few Chinese leaders of his day who could give the historians of the future any valid reasons for supposing that they believed in republican principles. Too many of the militarists and scholar-politicians of the North and South paid a half-contemptuous lip-service to the republic, primarily because they could not agree as to which one of them should have the Dragon Throne, or, at the least, the honor of restoring the Manchu Emperor—who stayed on in the Forbidden City until 1924.(141) Sun Yat-sen had a deep faith in the judgment and trustworthiness of the uncounted swarms of coolies and farmers whom most Chinese leaders ignored. He was perhaps the only man of his day really loved by the illiterate classes that knew of him, and was always faithful to their love. Other leaders, both Chinese and Western, have praised the masses but refused to trust them for their own good. Sun’s implicit belief in the political abilities of the common people in all matters which their knowledge equipped them to judge, was little short of ludicrous to many of his contemporaries, and positively irritating to some persons who wished him well personally but did not—at least privately—follow all of his ideas.