n, the student of politics who has been long in the
East at once becomes alert, not to say suspicious. A recent
illustration is so extreme that it will doubtless seem fantastic
beyond belief. But the student at home will have to take these seeming
fantasies seriously if he wishes to appreciate the present atmosphere
of China. Cables have brought fragmentary reports of some addresses of
Baron Goto in America. Doubtless in the American atmosphere these have
the effect of reassuring America as to any improper ambitions on the
part of Japan. In China, they were taken as announcements that Japan
has about completed its plans for the absorption of China, and that
the lucubration preliminary to operations of swallowing are about to
begin. The reader is forgiven in advance any scepticism he feels about
both the fact itself and the correctness of my report of the belief in
the alleged fact. His scepticism will not surpass what I should feel
in his place. But the suspicion aroused by such statements as this and
the recent interview of Foreign Minister Uchida and Baron Ishii must
be noted as evidences of the universal belief in China that Japan has
one mode of diplomacy for the East and another for the West, and that
what is said in the West must be read in reverse in the East.

China, whatever else it is, is not the land of privacies. It is a
proverb that nothing long remains secret in China. The Chinese talk
more easily than they act--especially in politics. They are adepts in
revealing their own shortcomings. They dissect their own weaknesses
and failures with the most extraordinary reasonableness. One of the
defects upon which they dwell is the love of finding substitutes for
positive action, of avoiding entering upon a course of action which
might be irrevocable. One almost wonders whether their power of
self-criticism is not itself another of these substitutes. At all
events, they are frank to the point of loquacity. Between the opposite
camps there are always communications flowing. Among official enemies
there are "sworn friends." In a land of perpetual compromise,
etiquette as well as necessity demands that the ways for later
accommodations be kept open. Consequently things which are spoken of
only under the breath in Japan are shouted from the housetops in
China. It would hardly be good taste in Japan to allude to the report
that influential Chinese ministers are in constant receipt of Japanese
funds and these corrupt of