These arrangements had, of course, been secretly agreed to en bloc
before the fighting had been stopped and the abdication
proclaimed, and were part and parcel of the elaborate scenery
which officialdom always employs in Asia even when it is dealing
with matters within the purview of the masses. They had been made
possible by the so-called "Article of Favourable Treatment" drawn-
up by Yuan Shih-kai himself, after consultation with the
rebellious South. In these Capitulations it had been clearly
stipulated that the Manchu Imperial Family should receive in
perpetuity a Civil List of $4,000,000 Mexican a year, retaining
all their titles as a return for the surrender of their political
power, the bitter pill being gilded in such fashion as to hide its
real meaning, which alone was a grave political error.
In spite of this agreement, however, great mutual suspicion
existed between North and South China. Yuan Shih-kai himself was
unable to forget that the bold attempt to assassinate him in the
Peking streets on the 17th January, when he was actually engaged
in negotiating these very terms of the Abdication, had been
apparently inspired from Nanking; whilst the Southern leaders were
daily reminded by the vernacular press that the man who held the
balance of power had always played the part of traitor in the past
and would certainly do the same again in the near future.
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