itself. The railway guards (the
difference between police and soldiers is nominal in China) were all
Chinese, the Germans merely training them. As soon as Japan invaded
Shantung and took over the railway, Chinese workmen and Chinese
military guards were at once dismissed and Japanese imported to take
their places. Tsinan-fu, the inland terminus of the ex-German railway,
is over two hundred miles from Tsing-tao. When the Japanese took over
the German railway business office, they at once built barracks, and
today there are several hundred soldiers still there--where Germany
kept none. Since the armistice even, Japan has erected a powerful
military wireless within the grounds of the garrison, against of
course the unavailing protest of Chinese authorities. No foreigner can
be found who will state that Germany used her ownership of port and
railway to discriminate against other nations. No Chinese can be found
who will claim that this ownership was used to force the Chinese out
of business, or to extend German economic rights beyond those
definitely assigned her by treaty. Common sense should also teach even
the highest paid propagandist in America that there is, from the
standpoint of China, an immense distinction between a national menace
located half way around the globe, and one within two days' sail over
an inland sea absolutely controlled by a foreign navy, especially as
the remote nation has no other foothold and the nearby one already
dominates additional territory of enormous strategic and economic
value--namely, Manchuria.

These facts bear upon the shadowy distinction between the Tsing-tao
and the Shantung claim, as well as upon the solid distinction between
German and Japanese occupancy. If there still seemed to be a thin wall
between Japanese possession of the port of Tsing-tao and usurpation of
Shantung, it was enough to stop off the train in Tsinan-fu to see the
wall crumble. For the Japanese wireless and the barracks of the army
of occupation are the first things that greet your eyes. Within a few
hundred feet of the railway that connects Shanghai, via the important
center of Tientsin, with the capital, Peking, you see Japanese
soldiers on the nominally Chinese street, guarding their barracks.
Then you learn that if you travel upon the ex-German railway towards
Tsing-tao, you are ordered to show your passport as if you were
entering a foreign country. And as you travel along the road
(remembering that you