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Updated: May 24, 2025
You should address the representatives and tell them that a monarchy having been decided on, not even a single day should pass without an emperor; that the citizens' representatives present should nominate Yuan Shih-kai as the Great Emperor of the Chinese Empire; and that if they are in favour of the proposal, they should signify their assent by standing up.
Indeed there is no reason to doubt that the Japanese Envoy actually told Yuan Shih-kai that as he was already virtually Emperor it lay within his power to settle the whole business and to secure his position at one blow.
It was inevitable in such circumstances that the history of the past six years should have been the history of a slow tragedy, and that almost every page should be written over with the name of the man who was the selected bailiff of the Powers Yuan Shih-kai. The Manchu people, who belong to the Mongol or Turanian Group, number at the maximum five million souls.
Yuan Shih-kai was determined to assert his mastery by any and every means; and as this man had flouted him he must die.
A bare quarter-of-an-hour before the police began their search he had embarked with his family on a Japanese steamer lying in the Tientsin river and could snap his fingers at Yuan Shih-kai. Once in Japan he lost no time in assembling his revolutionary friends and in a body they embarked for South China.
After saying that "the Japanese Minister tried to influence President Yuan Shih-kai with the following words," several long lines of asterisks suggest that after reflection the unknown chronicler had decided, for political reasons of the highest importance, to allow others to guess how the "conversation" opened.
Let us first give the official text of the original Demands: JAPAN'S ORIGINAL TWENTY-ONE DEMANDS Translations of Documents Handed to the President, Yuan shih-kai, by Mr. Hioki, the Japanese Minister, on January 18th, 1915.
Far and wide the word was rapidly passing that Yuan Shih-kai was not the man he had once been; he was in reality feeble and choleric prematurely old from too much history-making and too many hours spent in the harem. He had indeed become a mere Colossus with feet of clay, a man who could be hurled to the ground by precisely the same methods he had used to destroy the Manchus.
Every effort to break his will proved unavailing, his patience and calmness contributing very materially to the vast moral opposition which finally destroyed Yuan Shih-kai.
They were the most eminent progressive officials she had in her empire, but none of them were great enough to be a menace to her dynasty, and hence need not be reminded that there was a power above them which by a stroke of her pen could transfer them from stars in the official firmament to dandelions in the grass. Not so with Yuan Shih-kai but we will speak of him in another chapter.
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