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""""GENERAL SURVEY. 3the junk of state for many decades. From another hewas a venerable fossil partly but quite superficiallycovered with thin precipitates of "modernism," andthese were always at inconvenient times scaling off andshowing the interesting figure of a Confucian doctrinairewith his feet in the Sung dynasty and his head in theclouds." If China had the supply of able men whichmight be expected, the loss of Chang Chih-tung mightnot have been felt, but as it is, he removed one of thenot too numerous balance-wheels from the state machinery.The aged Sun Chia-nai was a man of weight andimportance in his way, but he belonged to an age whichhad never comprehended the new era in which he couldnot be classed as a leading figure. Yang Shih-hsiang,Governor-General of the Chihli province, was not a manof great abilities, but a substantial and a useful official.The fact that he retained his post after his patron Yuanhad fallen, may be taken as an indication that China isincreasingly sensitive to the opinions of the outsideworld. Tai Hung-tze, one of the Imperial Commissioners sent abroad five years ago to investigate Constitutional Government" seemed to be a rising man, whoseuntimely disappearance left a vacancy apparently noteasy to fill.The opening decade of the twentieth century hasbeen marked in China by one of the most singularphenomena in history the relatively rapid rise to selfconsciousnessand to world-consciousness of the Chinesepeople as a whole. It has long been recognized thatthe Chinese have always been in many of their socialhabits essentially democratic ;the theoretically absoluterule resting (theoretically) upon popular approbation.But this approbation has always been comparativelyinarticulate. What were the real motives that led thelate Grand-Dowager Empress to give her cordial approval to the introduction of a Constitution in Chinawe have no means of knowing, but whatever they may