nces our high finance has contracted a sort of economic
alliance with Great Britain. There is no wish to claim superior virtue
for America or to appeal to the strong current of anti-British
sentiment. But the British foreign office exists and operates apart
from the tradition of liberalism which has mainly actuated English
domestic politics. It stands peculiarly for the _Empire_ side of the
British Empire, no matter what party is in the saddle in domestic
affairs. Every resource will be employed to bring about a settlement
at the Pacific Conference which, even though it includes some degree
of compromise on the part of Great Britain, will bend the Asiatic
policy of the United States to the British traditions in the Far East,
instead of committing Great Britain to combining with the United
States in making a reality of the integrity of China to which both
countries are nominally committed. It does not seem an extreme
statement to say that the immediate issues of the Conference depend
upon the way in which our financial commitments in Europe are treated,
either as reasons for our making concessions to European policy or on
the other hand as a means of securing an adherence of the European
powers to the traditional American policy.

A publicist in China who is of British origin and a sincere friend of
China remarked in private conversation that if the United States could
not secure the adherence of Great Britain to her Asiatic policy by
persuasion (he was deploring the Japanese alliance) she might do so by
buying it--through remission of her national debt to us. It is not
necessary to resort to the measure so baldly suggested. But the remark
at least suggests that our involvement in European, especially
British, finance and politics may be treated in either of two ways for
either of two results.

2

That the Chinese people generally speaking has a less antagonistic
feeling toward the United States than towards other powers seems to me
an undoubted fact. The feeling has been disturbed at divers times by
the treatment of the Chinese upon the Pacific coast, by the exclusion
act, by the turning over of our interest in the building of the
Peking-Canton (or Hankow) railway to a European group, by the
Lansing-Ishii agreement, and finally by the part played by President
Wilson in the Versailles decision regarding Shantung. Those
disturbances in the main, however, have made them dubious as to our
skill, energy and intelligenc