Peking, Jan. 19.
A great war between America and Japan has already been fought and won and lost in the metropolitan press.
Here in Peking we have had three weeks of incessant war talk, which Chinese from the South assure us is not reflected in the vernacular journals of Shanghai, Hankow or Canton. Telegrams have been deliberately ''faked," foreign news has been manufactur ed by the yard in Chinese editorial offices and even the Chinese-owned papers published in English have been carried away by the general hysteria and have reproduced long translations from the native press dealing with a hypothetical war between the United States and Japan. This gossip has turned the heads of many really sensible people in the Ministries and wherever one goes it is now impossible to discuss anything but war and what would happen in ease of war. The Legations are, therefore, interested and are making vigorous efforts to trace this rumour epidemic to the source of infection.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.