illusions we may have held during the World War that the Western powers had given up their selfish ambitions in China as a corollary of the new idealism resulting from the war-and in the Far East we held those illusions with pathetic trust-have been dispelled by harsh realities. In 1922, as a generation ago, the only nation that has purely commercial aims in China, the only nation that has not political and monopolistic ambitions, is the United States.

If America is convinced that its interests in China are sufficiently vital to be worth the price of war, which I maintain they now very clearly are not, let it at least be logical. Let it realize that it must then do what no sane American can or would contemplate. It must build It must build a fleet large enough to be able to fight in both oceans. It must fight the great powers combined. To fight Japan alone and even to win a crushing victory is still to leave China a ground for spoils, freed, it is true, of its most active and dangerous despoiler, but freed only of that one. The problem of the Far East would remain. China would still not be a sovereign and independent nation; there would still be no equality of opportunity for trade by all nations, and America's policy would still be far from realization. We should be only where we were before, with blood and money sacrificed in vain. That truth cannot be blinked, and the fact that it is either ignored or glossed in all the angry flood that has been poured out on Japan by a certain school of Americans has resulted only in giving us a one-sided and erroneous picture of China and Japan and the whole Far-Eastern question.

Let it be assumed, however, that Japan is the only power that threatens China and that it continues to prosecute its policy of gaining hegemony over China, to the exclusion of American interests, even to the locking out of America from the Asiatic mainland. Let it be assumed even that Japan is in a fair way to make China a colonial possession, as it has Korea. What, then, from America's point of view?

Certainly the trifling trade we have in China now does not warrant the extremity of war. It is not vitally necessary to our existence now, and the time when the trade of China will be is so distant and the possibilities of new and unpredictable elements entering into the situation in the intervening years so great, that to contemplate war now or in the immediate future is fantastic.

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There is the much-vaunted specter of the Yellow Peril. It has been said so often that it has come to be believed that Japan would get command of China's enormous man power and with that set out to terrorize the world, subjugating America as the first in its path. That hallucination must once and for all be dispelled if we are to do any straight thinking about the Far East.

The most obvious fact in the Far East to-day is the bitterness of the Chinese against the Japanese. It is one of the few bonds that unites Chinese of all classes. It extends into depths of the interior where many of the people do not yet know that the monarchy no longer exists. I have found it among peasants who have never seen a newspaper and know of such things as the telegraph only

by legend and are skeptical thereof. The fact that certain elements in China's corrupt officialdom have sold themselves to Japan only accentuates it.

This bitterness roots deeper than mere resentment at Japan's recent aggressions and the brutality that has accompanied those aggressions. It is partly racial. There is just enough kinship between the two peoples to make the wide differences between them the more irritating mutually.

It is partly historical also. For centuries the Chinese were masters of the East. To them came envoys out of all Asia bearing tribute. Theirs was the civilization that lifted other Far-Eastern peoples out of barbarism. Now the Chinese are sunk in subjection, prey for the world's plucking, which the Japanese, whom they taught to read, to write, to express themselves in the arts, to garb themselves beautifully, to integrate themselves in the universe through philosophy, to worship their gods, have suddenly risen to world eminence, and show their contempt correspondingly. The bitterness of the Chinese is the response of the pride of a broken people to that contempt.

Of this bitterness the Japanese of the ruling classes have become fully aware. Into whatever folly the stupidity of the militarist mind may be tray them, it will not lead them to suicide. They may seek to impose conquest on China. Because they are well equipped in modern armament, and the Chinese are not, they may succeed; but they will not stir the somnolent man power of China. They are a nation of sixty million people on a group of little islands. The Chinese are four hundred millions,

stretched over half a continent just twelve hours away. To arm and train in the use of arms those four hundred millions, smarting with the anguish of a subject race fallen in grandeur, might set them on a career of world conquest; but their first act would be to crush their conquerors as a gorilla mangles a peanut. And Japan knows it. Not for generations, not until the feeling between the two peoples has disappeared—and history proves that suppressed nationalisms have never been extinguished-would the Japanese venture on that enterprise.

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Even command of a willing man power, however, would mean little to the Japanese by way of war asset. In modern warfare military strength is measured not so much by numbers as by the degree of advancement a nation has reached in technical development. Not in millions of men, but in effective industrial organization, lies strength. The Chinese millions might be ever so eager to spring to arms at the mikado's call, but until railroads cross China in every direction, until its coal and iron are mined, and steel mills are erected, and factories are at work everywhere, until a population exists trained in industrial efficiency, the Chinese millions will be militarily of little use. That day is hazily remote.

Only on the outermost edges of the fringe has China as yet emerged from the handicraft state of production. Everywhere except in the districts contiguous to the larger centers, which have had some foreign contact, life is organized as it was before the Christian era. Nor can it successfully

emerge from that state into industrialism until it has gone through a great social and political transition, until the whole structure of its civilization is built anew. That, too, is a matter of generations. Only when those generations have passed is there practical possibility of Japan's being able to use China's millions for purposes of war against the United States or any other country.

It is urged, also, that Japan's conquest of China would give it, if not man power, at least command of the untold wealth of China's resources, to be turned to account for military purposes. That, too, needs close examination. Great resources there are in China, to be sure, coal and iron and metals and minerals and oil and cotton, all the raw materials of one of the world's great arsenals. But the development of those resources is contingent on the building up, first, of a strong, stable, centralized government capable of maintaining order and functioning efficiently in a complex national organization. Principally, it must be able to maintain order; to-day it is impossible to make surveys for a railway a hundred miles from a provincial capital because of robber bands. How long and tortuous will be the course of events before there is such a government we have come to realize who have watched China wallowing in the trough since the republic was established. For that, too, means a reconstruction of civilization. And when that comes, when China is unified and coördinated, when its people have a responsive and informed political consciousness, when they can act unitedly for a common purpose, it will go hard with an alien conqueror, whether Japan or any other. Just as

effectively as arming them will the establishment of a strong and efficient government put into the hands of the Chinese the means of their liberation. If China can be conquered now, that is only because it is weak, unorganized, and undeveloped. It can be held in subjugation only so long as it remains weak, unorganized, and undeveloped. While it remains in that condition, its man power is of no military utility and its resources must remain in the soil.

All this is to say that if Japan is able to conquer China or even to establish itself securely enough to have exclusive access to its resources; if it is able to maintain itself in conquest, being thereby the only nation that has succeeded in so doing in two thousand years, as witness the Tatars, the Mongols, and the Manchus; if it is able to overcome the bitterness of the Chinese and persuade them to renounce their nationality; if China succeeds in going through the unmeasurably complicated processes of political, social, and economic transition to a new form of civilization; if, then, the resources of China are developed and China industrialized into an effective unit of steel and steam, and the Chinese be meanwhile hypnotized into refraining from the use of that power to reassert their national identity, as marked a national identity as exists in the world, then, possibly, Japan will have forged an invincible human weapon of the Chinese. And only then. Of such stuff is the menace that Japan presents to America now and in the early future by reason of its designs on China-a menace so thinned, so paled, so remote, that seriously to contemplate war as a measure of foresight against that distant day and to sacrifice thousands of lives therein is

to propose a form of insurance so costly as to be palpably absurd.

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There enters at this point the whole question of the weakness and disorganization of China and the invitation to external spoliation that constitutes. On that the whole FarEastern problem turns. It has created the problem as posed in the present, and it will determine the form the problem takes in the future. An independent, stable, and self-sustained China is indispensable not only to maintenance of equality of opportunity for traders of various nations. It is indispensable also to the maintenance of peace. A helpless and disorganized China has been and always must be a standing temptation to foreign meddling, to international intrigue. It must always be a diplomatic and financial battle-ground, a Balkans on a much larger scale and with the inevitable ultimate consequences.

Now, it is indisputable that Japan to-day stands squarely in the way of stabilization and reconstruction in China. It debauches the Government by bribery, incites internal disturbance, subsidizes disorder, and commits direct territorial, political, and economic aggressions. Until it moderates its ambitions and changes the scope of its designs on the continent, China cannot set its house in order. But the military defeat of Japan by another power and its elimination as a disturbing element in China would not necessarily lead to China's setting its house in order. If the islands that make up Japan were by some unimaginable act of nature suddenly submerged to the bottom of

the Pacific, and every Japanese soul with them, that would not follow. China would remain weak, corrupt, chaotic, with only the one disturbing element removed.

The cause of that condition goes deeper than the acts of Japan or the whole of foreign meddling. That has complicated the condition, but it has not caused it. So also must the remedy go deeper. The cause is inherent in the nature of Chinese society in this stage of history. It is concerned with the breakdown of Chinese forms, partly under the pressure of time, partly under the pressure of contact with the outer world as the result of the wider reach of communications that have ended China's isolation. It is in the world, but not of it. There can be no remedy save by the slow course of social and political evolution, the transition of which I have been talking, of which there is already a beginning, albeit a pitiful one. Freedom from all foreign interference will accelerate the course of evolution, but only in that way will anything outside China affect it.

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Freedom from Japanese encroachment doubtless would speed China's progress, but it is conceivable that freedom brought about by the efforts of another power might have the opposite effect. It is quite conceivable that no greater disservice could be done China than for America to come to its rescue from Japan. The ground already given the Chinese for believing that America will do so has already had its ill effects. It tends to make them more complacent in their lethargy, and until they themselves are stirred to work out their