Vengeance Fund

The equivalent of two million dollars gold was subscribed to a "vengeance fund," last week at Tientsin, by enraged surviving relatives of great Yuan Shih-kai (1859-1916). He was the last of the Manchu Viceroys, and became in 1912 the second President of the Chinese Republic. Last week his sons were made irate by reports that Yuan's mighty tomb in Honan, his native province, has recently been looted and denied by the itinerant so-called Christian War Lord, Feng Yu-hsiang, who has now made Honan his base (TIME, Jan. 23).

Outstanding among contributors to the ''vengeance fund," last week, was Yuan's onetime sixth and favorite concubine, now a very aged lady of august consequence and immense wealth. With her approval, Yuan Shih-kai's eldest son, Yuan Keh-cheng, took charge of the $2,000,000 fund and announced that he would at once raise and equip two brigades of troops to fight against Feng Yu-hsiang, despoiler of tombs.

The troops will fight, of course, in the usual spring civil war which flames up each year between North and South China. At present Feng Yu-hsiang is fighting on the side of the Southern Nanking Nationalist Government and against the Northern armies of Marshal Chang Tso-lin, famed semi-imperial Dictator. Thus it will be under the banner of Dictator Chang Tso-lin that the vengeance brigades of Yuan Shih-kai's relatives will fight.

Chinese who cannot but deplore the present political disintegration of their country, wished last week that great Yuan Shih-kai might rise as a towering cohesive force from his open tomb in Honan. So great and national was his prestige that during the last year of his life and of his Presidency (1916) a movement to proclaim him Emperor and seat him on the Dragon Throne failed by the narrowest of margins. When the Chinese Revolution broke, in 1911, Yuan Shih-kai, then Viceroy of Hunan and Hupeh, declared with prophetic vision: "Chaos will ensue. . . . For several decades there will be no peace in China."