insidious attempts to
place her outside and beyond the operation of international law and all
those sanctions which make life worth living; and because of the formal
birth of a Foreign Policy it can be definitely expected that this
nation, despite its internal troubles and struggles, will never rest
content until she has created a new nexus of world-relationships which
shall affirm and apply every one of the principles experience elsewhere
has proved are the absolute essentials to peace and happiness. China is
already many decades ahead of Japan in her theory of government, no
matter what the practice may be, the marvellous revolution of 1911
having given back to this ancient race its old position of leader in
ideas on the shores of the Yellow Sea. The whole dream Japan has
cherished, and has sought to give form to during the war, is in the last
analysis antiquated and forlorn and must ultimately dissolve into thin
air; for it is monstrous to suppose, in an age when European men have
sacrificed everything to free themselves from the last vestiges of
feudalism, that in the Far East the cult of Sparta should remain a
hallowed and respected doctrine. Japan's policy in the Far East during
the period of the war has been uniformly mischievous and is largely
responsible for the fierce hatreds which burst out in 1917 over the war
issue; and China will be forced to raise at the earliest possible moment
the whole question of the validity of the undertakings extorted from her
in 1915 under the threat of an ultimatum. Although the precise nature
of Anglo-Japanese diplomacy during the vital eleven days from the 4th to
the 15th August, 1914 [_i.e._ from the British declaration of war on
Germany to the Japanese ultimatum regarding Kiaochow] remains a sealed
book, China suspects that Japan from the very beginning of the present
war world-struggle has taken advantage of England's vast commitments and
acted _ultra vires_. China hopes and believes that Britain will never
again renew the Japanese alliance, which expires in 1921, in its present
form, particularly now that an Anglo-American agreement has been made
possible. China knows that in spite of all coquetting with both the
extreme radical and military parties which is going on daily in Peking
and the provinces the secret object of Japanese diplomacy is either the
restoration of the Manchu dynasty, or the enthronement of some pliant
usurper, a puppet-Emperor being what is needed to repe