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Updated: May 24, 2025
These men were Li Hung-chang, Chang Chih-tung, Yuan Shih-kai, Prince Ching, and others, and it is they who, in ten years, with the Empress Dowager, put into operation, in a statesmanlike way, all the reforms that Kuang Hsu, with his hot-headed young radical advisers, attempted to force upon the country in as many weeks.
He was hailed as a young Confucius, but his popularity was short-lived, for he so lacked all statesmanship as to allow the young Emperor to issue twenty-seven edicts, disposing of twenty-seven difficult problems such as I have given above in about twice that many days, and it is this hot-headed and unstatesman-like young "Confucius" who now calls Yuan Shih-kai an opportunist and a traitor because he did not enter into the following plot.
Rumours of an attempted assassination of Yuan Shih-kai by means of bombs now circulated, and there were many arrests and suicides in the capital. Though by a mandate issued on the 23rd February, the enthronement ceremony was indefinitely postponed, that move came too late.
Thus it is correct to declare that had he so wished Yuan Shih-kai could have crushed the revolution entirely before the end of 1911; but he was sufficiently astute to see that the problem he had to solve was not merely military but moral as well. The Chinese as a nation were suffering from a grave complaint.
In any case it was certainly Yuan Shih-kai who drew up the so-called Articles of Favourable Treatment for the Manchu House and caused them to be telegraphed to the South, whence they were telegraphed back to him as the maximum the Revolutionary Party was prepared to concede: and by a curious chance the attempt made to assassinate him outside the Palace Gates actually occurred on the very day he had submitted an outline of these terms on his bended knees to the Empress Dowager and secured their qualified acceptance.
The bank profits on this loan alone amounted to 1 1/4 million pounds; whilst Yuan Shih-kai himself was placed in possession by a system of weekly disbursements of a sum roughly amounting to ten million sterling, which was amply sufficient to allow him to wreak his will on his fellow-countrymen.
Yuan Shih-kai was striving with all his might to retain the dynasty as a limited monarchy, but "coming events cast their shadows before" in the resignation of the Regent early in December.
But the pressure from the outside was not all of this sinister sort; friendly representations from the genuinely well-disposed Powers did a good deal to bring the combatants to a mutual understanding. But throughout the revolution, as in the final result, the great outstanding, commanding figure was Yuan Shih-kai himself.
Yuan Shih-kai was, therefore, especially commanded some time ago to dispatch commissioners to confer with the representatives of the Republican Army on the general situation and to discuss matters pertaining to the convening of a National Assembly for the decision of the suitable mode of settlement has been discovered.
Within an hour of the death of Yuan Shih-kai, the veteran General Tuan Chi-jui, in his capacity of Secretary of State, had called on Vice-President Li Yuan-hung the man whom years before he had been sent to the Yangtsze to bring captive to Peking and welcomed him as President of the Republic.
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