FOREWORD
data with information concerning China, for the average Occidental reader is not well informed concerning Chinese social or political life, and hence would not understand Sun's life without having a collateral story of China told at the same time. Certain phases of Sun's political activity would entail much more of an explanation than the limits of a popular volume would allow. It has been found necessary to cut the original manuscript down to less than half of its original composition. Reducing the size of the manuscript has exacted six complete revisions and rewritings, and the author hopes that at length he has given the Occidental at least something of an understandable picture of the Chinese Reformer in the following episodic chapters.
The author has not involved this work with much reference to the terrible struggles now going on in China between Sun Yat Sen and the Chinese masses on the one hand, as against Peking militarism, supported by certain banking and commercial interests of Japan and of certain Christian lands, on the other. This is an argumentative field beyond the purview of the volume. The author, however, voices the hope that the present tuchun war in China will awaken, eventually, American democracy to the great need of protecting its own institutions by supporting the
x
