Holcombe of Harvard University was in China, he was in search of a Government and a system of Government. For that is his especial business in life, anal; ing governmental processes. He came to China via Suez and Singapore and left it via Russia, Ile was here during the December Communist rebellion in Canton and saw the capture of Peking by the Kuomintang seven or eight months later. In a word, he was in China during the formative period of the king Government, which political institution, marks the rise to power nf the Kuomintang unassisted by Communism and Soviet Russia in contrast to the Canton and Hankow Governments which were a union between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party. The divorce marks a permanent difference not only in ideology but in methods of procedure, in international relationships and in do-mastic policy. Foreigners often Suggest that all this talk, about ideology is mere persiflage; that only a tiny fraction of the whole People are affected by prin ciples; that the vast masses of the Chinese people hardly know what it is all about. This view does not at all take into con the intensive and propaganda of 1924 to vhich covered every proof the South and affected ry village in those provinces.
view does not take into consideration the fact that this propaganda "took" most potently, not in the industrial and west-arnly-affected cities of Canton and Shanghai but in the interior of such provinces as Hunan, Hupeh, Kiangsi and Kuangsi, When Professor Holcombe was here, the intest vital propaganda effort had ceased, but he was keenly sensitive to its force and his task was to find what it was all about, The result of his study not only in China but at the Research Department of Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow as well, is the ablest and most plete presentation of—Kuor tang ideology, principles, policy and method that has yet appeared. He answers the question as to what it is all about just as Bryce answered it for the United States and Lowell for England. That is, the professor of governmental studies recog-sizes China as an experimental laboratory, used scientific methods of approach and produced an impartial, studious analysis which will stand as long as the Kuomintang is important and which will afterwards be used as the reference book for the historical student, The structure of Professor Holcombe's thesis is splendid. Iie states the problem of China, which is divided into three questions: The Disintegration of China, the Nationalist Movement and the Question of Chinese Poli tical Capacity. He then deals with the central idea of the book and professor Holeombe's assumption as to what.is the central idea of China's particular political and social genius, namely, the Scholastic Empire. The next two, chapters are historial resumes, which bridge over the gap between disintegra-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.