British
official phrasing is an admirable method to be here employed. The
preamble is quite English; it is so English that one is almost lulled
into believing that one's previous reasoning has been at fault and that
Japan is only demanding what she is entitled to. Yet study Group II
closely and subtleties gradually emerge. By boldly and categorically
placing Eastern Inner Mongolia on precisely the same footing as Southern
Manchuria--though they have nothing in common--the assumption is made
that the collapse in 1908 of the great Anglo-American scheme to run a
neutral railway up the flank of Southern Manchuria to Northern Manchuria
(the once celebrated Chinchow-Aigun scheme), coupled with general
agreement with Russia which was then arrived at, now impose upon China
the necessity of publicly resigning herself to a Japanese overlordship
of that region. In other words, the preamble of Group II lays down that
Eastern Inner Mongolia has become part and parcel of the Manchurian
Question because Japan has found a parallel for what she is doing in the
acts of European Powers.

These things, however, need not detain us. Not that Manchuria or the
adjoining Mongolian plain is not important; not that the threads of
destiny are not woven thickly there. For it is certain that the vast
region immediately beyond the Great Wall of China is the Flanders of the
Far East--and that the next inevitable war which will destroy China or
make her something of a nation must be fought on that soil just as two
other wars have been fought there during the past twenty years. But this
does not belong to contemporary politics; it is possibly an affair of
the Chinese army of 1925 or 1935. Some day China will fight for
Manchuria if it is impossible to recover it in any other way,--nobody
need doubt that. For Manchuria is absolutely Chinese--people must
remember. No matter how far the town-dwelling Japanese may invade the
country during the next two or three decades, no matter what large
alien garrisons may be planted there, the Chinese must and will remain
the dominant racial element, since their population which already
numbers twenty-five millions is growing at the rate of half a million a
year, and in a few decades will equal the population of a first-class
European Power.

When we reach Group III we touch matters that are not only immediately
vital but quite new in their type of audacity and which every one can
to-day understand since they are pol