bearance. We were afraid of the bugbear of China.
The British Government says to her victim after the chastisement:
'You've had your lesson. Now run off and be good.' And the spoilt child
of arrested civilization runs off with his tongue in his cheek and
learns to make new arms and friends. The British Government in the
meantime sleeps in smug complacency, and Exeter Hall is appeased.

'But why did you not treat with the Tibetans themselves?' Pere Desgodins
asked. 'China!'--here he made an expressive gesture--'I have known China
for fifty years. She is not your friend.' Of course it is to the
interest of China to keep the tea monopoly, and to close the market to
British India. Travellers on the Chinese borders are given passports and
promises of assistance, but the natives of the districts they traverse
are ordered to turn them back and place every obstacle in their way.
Nobody knows this better than Father Desgodins. China's policy is the
same with nations as with individuals. She will always profess
willingness to help, but protest that her subjects are unmanageable and
out of hand. Why, then, deal with China at all? We can only answer that
she had more authority in Lhasa in 1888. Moreover, we were more afraid
of offending her susceptibilities. But that bubble has burst.

Others who hold different views from Pere Desgodins say that this very
unruliness of her vassal ought to make China welcome our intervention in
Tibet, if we engage to respect her claims there when we have subdued the
Lamas. This policy might certainly point a temporary way out of the
muddle, whereby we could save our face and be rid of the Tibet incubus
for perhaps a year. But the plan of leaving things to the suzerain Power
has been tried too often.

As I rode down the Pedong street from the presbytery someone called me
by name, and a little, smiling, gnome-like man stepped out of a
whitewashed office. It was Phuntshog, a Tibetan friend whom I had known
six years previously on the North-East frontier. I dismounted,
expecting entertainment.

The office was bare of furniture save a new writing-table and two
chairs, but heaped round the walls were piles of cast steel and iron
plates and files and pipes for bellows. Phuntshog explained that he was
frontier trade examiner, and that the steel had been purchased in
Calcutta by a Lama last year, and was confiscated on the frontier as
contraband. It was material for an armoury. The spoilt child was making