Note 3 — Chapter IV

A very clear statement as to the position in China was that given in London during January of 1912 by Mr Kwei Chih, a secretary of the Chinese Legation.

"None of the dynasties in China," he said, "has ever maintained a tyrannical régime for any length of time, least of all the Manchu dynasty, the policy of which has consisted rather of a mixture of paternalism and obscurantism than of hard repression of the people.... The present unanimous desire of the Chinese to remove the Manchu dynasty arises solely from the fact that the Chinese have fully awakened to the realisation that only a policy of thoroughgoing Westernisation can save China from disruption and partition. The removal of the Manchu dynasty is of no greater national moment to China than would be the fall of a Cabinet to any European country. Personal animus enters, indeed, so little into the determination of the new Chinese régime that the question of setting apart lands for the deposed dynasty, and even of granting it ex-territorial privileges, may eventually be accepted in the way of a solution. In regard to the adoption of Republican ideas, it may be said that the Chinese statesman does not understand the meaning of the Republican principle, and if a new régime should declare itself Republican, its Republicanism will be of a much more strongly democratic type than any known to Europe. It will even be more popular in its constitution than the American, and will far more fully seek the development of the common weal than most bureaucratic systems bearing the name. The suggested application of Christian principles to the new régime may be regarded as wholly impossible. Confucianism, by which China stands or falls, is a secular philosophy, the only semblance of a spiritual or religious tenet in which is the principle of ancestor-worship, and though a theocratic idea is admitted in the creation of the universe, the question of a life hereafter is wholly excluded from its teachings."