Yet this is not all. As if in alarm at the very conclusions he so
purposely reaches, at the end of his Memorandum he reduces these
conclusions to naught by stating that three impossible conditions
are necessary to consummate the Restoration of the Monarchy in
China, (1) no opposition should be aroused, (2) the law of
succession must be properly settled, (3) full provision must be
made for the development of Constitutional Government. That these
conditions were known to be impossible, everyone in the Far East
had long admitted. Had Dr. Goodnow paid the slightest attention to
the course of history in China he would have known (a) that any
usurpation of the Throne would infallibly lead to rebellion in
China and intervention on the part of Japan, (b) that Yuan Shih-
kai's power was purely personal and as such could not be
transmitted to any son by any means known to the human intellect,
(c) that all Yuan Shih-kai's sons were worthless, the eldest son
being semi-paralyzed, (d) that constitutional government and the
Eastern conception of kingship, which is purely theocratic, are so
antithetical that they cannot possibly co-exist, any re-
establishment of the throne being ipso facto the re-establishment
of a theocracy, (e) that although he so constantly speaks of the
low political knowledge of the people, the Chinese have had a most
complete form of local self-government from the earliest times,
the political problem of the day being simply to gather up and
express these local forms in some centralized system: (f) the so-
called non-patriotism of the Chinese is non-existent and is an
idea which has been spread abroad owing to the complete foreign
misunderstanding of certain basic facts--for instance that under
the Empire foreign affairs were the sole concern of the Emperors,
provincial China prior to 1911 being a socio-economic
confederation resembling mediaeval contrivances such as the
Hanseatic League--a provincial confederation not concerning
itself with any matter which lay outside its everyday economic
life, such as territorial overlordship or frontier questions or
the regulation of sea-port intercourse etc.
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