Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/74

 of men who had managed to acquire firearms, was plainly the enemy; for the soldiers openly declared that they had made the revolution, and that without them the revolutionary leaders could not have lived an hour. This was unfortunately only half the truth and therefore as dangerous as all half-truths inherently are. For the revolution was as much the work of the foreigner as it was of the Chinese. The Manchus could never have been dethroned had their borrowing-power on foreign markets not been deliberately cancelled by the action of foreign diplomacy, which yielding to the clamour of publicists declared that the Western world would maintain strict neutrality until a decision was reached. Consequently, the army in spite of its boast was really dependent on an alien paymaster who could only be reached by a method which its leader and creator—Yuan Shih-kai—had brought to a fine art. This method was a mixture of bluff, promises to rival legations, and threats—above all, threats that if hard cash were not forthcoming all China would go up in flames. By finding the monthly quotas for the troops Yuan Shih-kai became supreme.

Only on the surface, however. For the army had become contumacious even before the