In the
circumstances his authority could not but be very limited,
disclosing itself in passive rather than in active ways. Wishing
to be above all a constitutional President, he quickly saw that an
interregnum must be philosophically accepted during which the
Permanent Constitution would be worked out and the various parties
forced to a general agreement; and thanks to this decision the
year which has now elapsed since Yuan Shih-kai's death has been
almost entirely eventless, with the exception of the crisis which
arose over the war-issue, a matter which is fully discussed
elsewhere.
Meanwhile, in the closing months of 1916, the position was not a
little singular. Two great political parties had arisen through
the Revolution--the Kuo Ming Tang or Nationalists, who included
all the Radical elements, and the Chinputang or Progressives,
whose adherents were mainly men of the older official classes, and
therefore conservative. The Yunnan movement, which had led to the
overthrow of Yuan Shih-kai, had been inspired and very largely
directed by the scholar Liang Ch'i-chao, a leader of the
Chinputang. To this party, then, though numerically inferior to
the Kuo Ming Tang, was due the honour and credit of re-
establishing the Republic, the Kuo Ming Tang being under a cloud
owing to the failure of the Second Revolution of 1913 which it had
engineered. Nevertheless, owing to the Kuo Ming Tang being more
genuinely republican, since it was mainly composed of younger and
more modern minds, it was from its ranks that the greatest check
to militarism sprang; and therefore although its work was
necessarily confined to the Council-chamber, its moral influence
was very great and constantly representative of the civilian
element as opposed to the militarist.
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