China, Japan and Korea (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: a government of the people by the people for the people, universal suffrage, conscription, and even votes for women. Opinions of this kind, arising out of one of the most persistent delusions common to humanity, are more easily disseminated than dissolved. With regard to China's brief vision of Celestial Socialism, there are many observers who persist in believing in the mystic power of political formulae to accomplish the impossible and to change the whole structural character of the race.1 Yet the history of Young China's brief authority has been written with bloodshed and chaos throughout the land, in such a manner as to shatter beyond repair the people's faith in the healing virtue of the blessed word Republic. Within a year of Sun Yat-sen's declaration that the passing of the monarchy heralded " the dawn of peace and prosperity, just laws, and honest administration," the people's instinctive desire for authoritative rulership had already been clearly demonstrated. Even at that time Young China, absorbed in futile dissensions and sordid intrigues, had manifested the hopelessness of its bright vision of the millennium, while the struggle for supremacy between rival military chieftains was beginning to assume definite direction. Eight months after the revolution, the military and police authorities of the provinces had warned the members of the National Assembly " to cease from thwarting the Government by their senseless and selfish factions." The phenomena, which had been regarded by many as evidence of the fitness of the Chinese people for self- government under European institutions, had rapidly proved to be superficial and transient. The reaction of the textit{literati, of the military and the merchant classes against Sun Yat-sen's political adventures, proved clearly, if pr...