Now Wu Pei-fu takes himself and his schemes seriously and since July 17 the official classes have; come to take him almost as seriously as he takes himself. A serious man with such ideas as he ad-, vertises and with such a capacity, for hard fighting in the field is! really a terrible menace to every. official from the president down' to the meanest clerk in the: Ministry of Communications who squanders his petty hundred dollars a night at the gambling table. Wu Pei-fu only lacks at this moment the open support of the people to enable him to put his plans into execution.
Then what sort of a place would Peking be for the office hunter? A man might as well be a salesman in a silk shop as a clerk in the Ministry of Communications if Peking were run by a truly representative Government. The very; President himself would be reduced to working for China and not for his friends. There would be no more glory in that than there would be in being a traffic policeman at the Chien Men. And the Tuchuns—the Tuchuns simply would not exist, for the governors of provinees would be prosy civil officials with provincial legislatures auditing their accounts. having as dull atime on the whole as the president.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.