Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/78

 vastly outnumbered by swarms of old levies. Moreover, all the machinery of army administration, as well as all the reserves of arms and ammunition, were under the control of Peking; and when we add that the borrowing-power had been inherited by those who were ten minutes from Legation Street, it will be seen that the odds could not but be heavily in favour of the North.

Nevertheless the South remained determined regarding the necessity of substituting effective parliamentary government for military dictation. The Southern leaders, of course, knew that they had not really won in 1912 when the infant emperor Hsuan-Tung abdicated, and that the big battle had yet to be fought. The abdication had been due primarily to Yuan Shih-kai, who was influenced by three things—hatred of a dynasty that had desired his blood; ambition to rule the nation himself; and an inveterate habit of following foreign opinion because that opinion controlled the stock markets on which China had lived for twenty years. Consequently, when the Manchus had been eliminated, there remained for him two controlling impulses and only two—his ambition and the foreign money-market. Everything else—parliament, people, and provincial capi-