Sepl. 13.
Ir seems that we must apologize both to Mr.sfong Shao-yi and his interviewer for misunderstanding what they, respectively, said and wrote. It is almost a capital offence nowadays in China to hint that anyone holds monarchical ideas, although here, again, there is much confused thinking and hypnotism by mere words. Great Britain, for example, is certainly a monarchy, because it has a "king who never dies." Yet in fact it is far more nearly a republic than was ancient Rome, certainly than ancient Athens—which was an aristocracy based fon slave labour—and to some extent more so even than the United States, whose constitution confers on' the President emergency powers of absolutism such as the British King cannot exercise in any circumstances whatever.
The notion of a Federated States of China, more on the lines of Canada' than Americi 8 very much discussed in the year following the war, Dr. C. T.
Wang in particular being an exponent of it. Recently we have not heard it talked about so much, although it is undoubtedly favoured by many thinkers. It certainly responds to many ideas fund: mental in Chinese life, the very large measure of village autonomy that has always prevailed and the dominating idea of family individ It appears to solve the difficulty of welding together the wide provincial differences of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.