Liang Shih-yi, who was the Power behind Yuan Shih-kai, now proscribed and living in exile at Hong-Kong.
Meanwhile, for the time being, in China as in countries ten thousand miles away, ministerial irresponsibility is the enemy; that is to say that so-called Cabinet-rule, with the effacement of the Chief Executive, has tended to make Cabinet Ministers removed from effective daily control. All sorts of things are done which should not be done and men are still in charge of portfolios who should be summarily expelled from the capital for malpractices.[[22]] But although Chinese are slow to take action and prefer to delay all decisions until they have about them the inexorable quality which is associated with Fate, there is not the slightest doubt that in the long run the dishonest suffer, and an increasingly efficient body of men take their place. From every point of view then there is reason for congratulation in the present position, and every hope that the future will unroll peacefully.
A visit to Parliament under the new régime is a revelation to most men: the candid come away with an impression which is never effaced from their minds. There is a peculiar suggestiveness even in the location of the Houses of the National Assembly. They are tucked away in the distant Western city immediately under the shadow of the vast Tartar Wall as if it had been fully expected when they were called into being that they would never justify their existence, and that the crushing weight of the great bastion of brick and stone surrounding the capital would soon prove to them how futile it was for such palpable intruders to aspire to national control. Under Yuan Shih-kai, as under the Manchus, they were an exercise in the arm of government, something which was never to be allowed to harden into a settled practice. They were first cousins to railways, to electrical power, to metalled roadways and all those other modern instances beginning to modify an ancient civilization entirely based on agriculture; and because they were so distantly related to the real China of the farm-yard it was thought that they would always stand outside the national life.
That was what the fools believed. Yet in a copy of the rules of procedure of the old Imperial Senate (Tzuchengyuan) the writer finds this note written in 1910: "The Debates of this body have been remarkable during the very first session. They make it seem clear that the first National Parliament of 1913 will seize control of China and nullify the power of the Throne. Result, revolution—" Though the dating is a little confused, the prophecy is worthy of record.
The watchfulness of the special police surrounding the Parliament of 1916-1917 and the great number of these men also tells a story as eloquent as the location of the building. It is not so much that any contemplated violence sets these guardians here as the necessity to advertise that there has been unconstitutional violence in the past which, if possible, will be rigidly defeated in the future. Probably no National Assembly in the world has been held up to greater contempt than the Parliament of Peking and probably no body deserves it less. An afternoon spent in the House of Representatives would certainly surprise most open-minded men who have been content to believe that the Chinese experiment was what some critics have alleged it to be. The Chinese as a people, being used to guild-house proceedings, debates, in which the welfare of the majority is decided after an examination of the principles at stake, are a very old and well-established custom; and though at present there are awkwardnesses and gaucheries to be noted, when practice has become better fixed, the common sense of the race will abundantly disclose itself and make a lasting mark on contemporary history. There can be no doubt about this at all.
Take your seat in the gallery and see for yourself. The first question which rises to the lips is—where are the young men, those crude and callow youths masquerading as legislators which the vernacular press has so excessively lampooned? The majority of the members, so far from being young, are men of thirty or forty, or even fifty, with intelligent and tired faces that have lost the Spring of youth. Here and there you will even see venerable greybeards suffering from rheumy coughs who ought to be at home; and though occasionally there is a lithe youngster in European clothes with the veneer he acquired abroad not yet completely rubbed off, the total impression is that of oldish men who have reached years of maturity and who are as representative of the country and as good as the country is in a position to-day to provide. No one who knows the real China can deny that.
The Continental arrangement of the Members' desks and the raised tribune of the Speaker, with its rows of clerks and recorders, make an impression of orderliness, tinged nevertheless with a faint revolutionary flavour. Perhaps it is the straight black Chinese hair and the rich silk clothing, set on a very plain and unadorned background, which recall the pictures of the French Revolution. It is somehow natural in such circumstances that there should occasionally be dramatic outbursts with the blood of offenders bitterly demanded as though we were not living in the Twentieth Century when blood alone is admittedly no satisfaction. The presence of armed House police at every door, and in the front rows of the strangers' gallery as well, contributes to this impression which has certain qualities of the theatre about it and is oddly stimulating. China at work legislating has already created her first traditions: she is proceeding deliberately armed —with the lessons of the immediate past fully noted.
This being the home of a literary race, papers and notebooks are on most Members' desks. As the electric bells ring sharply an unending procession of men file in to take their seats, for there has been a recess and the House has been only half-filled. Nearly every one is in Chinese dress (pien-yi) with the Member's badge pinned conspicuously on the breast. The idea speedily becomes a conviction that this after all is not extraneous to the nation, but actually of the living flesh, a vital and imperative thing. The vastness and audacity of it all cannot fail to strike the imaginative mind, for the four or five hundred men who are gathered here typify, if they do not yet represent, the four or five hundred millions who make up the country. You see as it were the nation in profile, a ponderous, slow-moving mass, quickly responsive to curious sub-conscious influences—suddenly angry and suddenly calm again because Reason has after all always been the great goddess which is perpetually worshipped. All are scholarly and deliberate in their movements. When the Speaker calls the House in order and the debate commences, deep silence comes save for the movement of hundreds of nervous hands that touch papers or fidget to and fro. Every man uses his hands, particularly when he speaks, not clenched as a European would do, but open, with the slim fingers speaking a language of their own, twisting, turning, insinuating, deriding, a little history of compromises. It would be interesting to write the story of China from a study of the hands.
Each man goes to the rostrum to speak, and each has much to say. Soon another impression deepens—that the Northerners with their clear-cut speech and their fuller voices have an advantage over the Southerners of the kind that all public performers know. The mandarin language of Peking is after all the mother-language of officialdom, the madre lingua, less nervous and more precise than any other dialect and invested with a certain air of authority which cannot be denied. The sharp-sounding, high-pitched Southern voice, though it may argue very acutely and rapidly, appears at an increasing disadvantage. There seems to be a tendency inherent in it to become querulous, to make its pleading sound specious because of over-much speech. These are curious little things which have been not without influence in other regions of the world.