How Our Interests are Being Neglected—Opportunities Throwa Away—The Weakness of Foreign Office Methode The long continued sacrifice of British interests in China to the exigencies of the European situa-! tion was in the past sufficient! excuse for hopeless dormancy. 'There is perhaps a tendency for! this to become a vicious habit of, mind which we should struggle' against for interest at all costs: should never be allowed to die, and the British community in China should do its utmost to keep China _the public eye at home.
In this connexion it is significant and ominous that the hege-! many of America in matters Chin-) ese has received so little comment. It is for instance rather disturbing that the delegation of Franco-; British interest in China to President Wilson at the Peace Conference awoke no muriner of disgust in the Far East. The commitments of the unnecessary secret 'Treaty with Japan' as to Shantung apart, it is surely an incongruity that our interests should have been left for settlement with a man whose knowledge of the Far East-eyn question can only have been purely academic and who-was also! obsessed and thus handicapped with a single idea for which everything would be sacrificed—the! realization of the League of Nations. Add to which the fact that President Wilson had to choose between the devil of the racial question or the deep sea of the Shantung issue to secure Japanese adhension to the League and naturally chose the course which would involve him in no domestic trouble. It is, therefore, obvious that British interests were bound to suffer by the adoption of such a course, and that we extracted no wordy unrealities in the way of safeguards from Japan goes equally without saying.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.