Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/130

 exception of the United States, which are represented by a professor of political and economic science, all the Allied representatives since the inception of the Republic have been men lamentably untrained in the part played in the governing of their own countries by their own Legislatures. Had this not been so, no such stupidity would have been shown as in 1913, when with a golden opportunity to enforce constitutionalism on the leader of the militarists—Yuan Shih-kai—by demanding Parliamentary ratification of a prime financial measure, and thus securing once and for all that financial centralization in China was based on legislative acts, foreign ministers deliberately assisted the Dictator to make a coup d'état by means of foreign money—and thus gave the quarrel a vicious international character. The day has surely passed when such things can be tolerated; but until England, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan publicly repent, and send as envoys to the Chinese capital men specially selected by virtue of a long parliamentary experience in their own countries—plenipotentiaries who thoroughly understand the necessity of the supremacy of the Legislature even in China—there will be no great improvement in the methods of government in Peking. For China