Peking Views of the Outbreak star rose suddenly and rose high when he was admitted to the councils of the inner circle at Tientsin. He came pretending to- represent the southwestern provinces and the Yangtze Tuchuns and claiming sufficient influence among them to bring them to terms with Peking. The constituency which he boasted of when he came north, hoping to finance himself in direct proportion to his high pretensions, disowned and discredited him and his star waned as rapidly as it had risen. He left Peking a much smaller man, very much the old Wang Chan-yuan who functioned in a small subordinate way in the Yangtze three or four years ago when Li Shun was at the height of his power. The fact that Peking was able to send him home with a little bale of depreciated paper, worth perhaps $100,000, was evidence enough to the Chinese that he had gone into a rapid political decline. The ghastly mutiny; the 2nd Division, Wang's own division of which he himself has been for' some years in direct command, is simply an echo within the ranks of his own following of the sentence which was passed upon him here in Peking—he is finished.
It is said that the leaders of the mutiny made an effort to concentrate the looting upon the official institutions but failed to control indiscriminate pillaging. Sixty per cent. of the establishments robbed were the more pros erous shops, many of them officially financed as in all Chinese cities, but many more private mercantile houses which enjoyed no official patronage.
wanty per cent. of the places looted were private houses, while the remaining 20. per cent. were official buildings. Even this is an improvement upon most mutinies and is evidence that the mutiny was directed against officialdom. Nothing was dearer to Wang Chan-yuan's heart than his mint. There he made money underweight which he shipped free of freight charges into all the neighbouring provinces, realizing an enormous profit. The 2nd Division burned the mint after looting and wrecking it. They could not have burned their boats more effectually behind them, nor have demonstrated more clearly that they were not going back to their barracks.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.