Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/77

 Peking—a domination which, no matter how unreal it may have become, still lives in Northern China as a political concept, tradition playing such a powerful rôle among the educated and uneducated alike that no amount of argument can kill it. This, then, is the real quarrel between North and South in spite of all talk about constitutionalism,—namely, that the Peking tradition of a military domination has not been killed and cannot be killed until universal education has definitely relegated it to the limbo of forgotten things.

From the beginning of the revolution—that is, from October, 1911—the Northern army was not only filled with this tradition but was conscious of its strength. A number of the Northern provinces had so far completed their reorganization that Yuan Shih-kai at the time of the Manchu abdication had certainly a quarter-of-a-million fairly well-found troops under his direct orders. South of the Yangtsze the situation was very different. Some provinces had no more than mixed brigades of reorganized troops; and although five Southern provinces—Hupeh, Kiangsi, Chekiang, Kwangtung, and Yunnan—could each muster at least one good modern division with artillery and transport, they were without proper arsenals and were