To the sincere Chinese reformer the question of General Lu Yung-hsiang's sincerity is of more intense and vital interest than any foreigner would suspect. The self-government movement is very near and dear to them and they keenly resent the use of it by the official caste for purely selfish political ends, even though such usage is a tribute to the growing popularity of the idea. "Constitutionalism" and similar terms have been made the slogans of so many unworthy causes that to proclaim oneself a devotee of any such abused abstract term is to make oneself ridiculous. The advocates of self-government watch jealously any movement in the name of their cause, fearing that it may be dragged down into the same limbo in which the Chinese equivalent of such terms as constitutionalism, independence, legality, republicanism, and the like, now repose.
For this reason there has been a vast deal of correspondence between anxious individuals in Peking and their friends in the that there is a strong Anfu movement in the Yangtze Valley, that Lu_Yung-hsiang is being "'used,"" and that the ultimate design is to reinstate Tuan Chi-jui in the Premiership and reopen relations with the old patrons of the Anfu Government, the Japanese militar One correspondent, usually well formed but somewhat hysterical, adds that Wu Pei-fu and Feng Yji-hsiang have been cajoled "into going on a wild goose chase in Shensi and that this false which their power, has left the field open for a union of the Fengtien and Anfu. forces under Japanese patronage.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.