Granting all this for the sake of argument, do the merchant eommunities' feel that it puts heroism into timid men to know that if they took a strong stand on anything} and brought on a difficult situation, they would have no support} whatever from any of our valuable] chambers of commerce and that every big hong in the country would) have its agents rushing around to various Government. offices Home, saying: "Hush! For Heaven' sake do nothing! Shut up - that Minister of yours, he's gone mad. What of our pending contracts What of the boycott? What of our new agencies in the interior at the merey of the military? What of our chances of interest collection on that little Loan that we've made the Ministry of Communications out of the Chinese Government money) in our vaults? Don't rain us. Be reasonable with the Chinese and Legations because they cannot get together on any question, since there are always some who are!
upon earning Chinese "good-plus a large measure of! Chinese contempt, by _betraying the others. But if anyone could get the Peking representatives of 10 American, British and French hongs to attach their signatures to an expression of opinion upon the foulest outrage in China, the Corps Diplomatique would act in unison for a change, because the Plenipotentiaries would all roll out. of their chairs in a dead faint.
In the clubs the missionaries are! roundly cursed with piratical oaths because they get together to curry favour with the Chinese and undermine such poor efforts as our} Legations make in the protection of our interests. But no power can 1 our stalwart Anglo-Saxon merchants together to do anything! but "sing a song of sixpence," and that in abominable harmony' since they are too busy filching the song sheets from one another to watch any conductor. These sound ike strong statements but let the writer cite a neat little example.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.