When it comes to considering methods of disbandment there is, however, unlimited field for debate and therefore unlimited field for evasion and temporizing on the part of the military. Foreigners have been pretty generally convineed that it is futile to think of buying disbandment. The swollen proportions of the army can be so readily connected with that greater Chinese evil, the loan habit, that it should cause any student of the disbandment problem to hesitate about mentioning money even be fore studying the difficulties of applying money to army reduction To pay a Tuchun or any other military leader to reduce hia forces is only to encourage him to recruit more so that he may be paid again. Foreign supervision of a disband. ment loan is wholly impracticable. Those who have thought of it and have studied conditions have abandoned the thought, because to do it well enough to be worth the money an enormous staff and considerable authority would be essential, and if you had such a staff and sufficient authority you|f, would have power enough to dis band the army without money, so that it would be a wicked waste to spend the loan proceeds on the army.
There is not space to go into details and prove this, but itis true, as most foreign military experts and bankers have come to realize, to the great chagrin of the numerous Chinese politicians who have boosted the disbandment cause because they hoped for a disbandment loan.
With China disorganized and chaotic there is only one funda mental way of reducing the army and that is to starve it out of existence. It is a slow process to which the foreigner has contributed a very little and the Chinese nothing. The arms embargo and the Consortium's embargo upon political loans have undoubtedly cramped the militarists and have forced them to bring this whole disbandment. question to a head by monopolizing native revenues. So far, so good; but it has not gone very far certainly. The fervent hope of the nation each time a war is imminent that a good many soldiers will be killed off and a great many' more disbanded is inevitably disappointed. For every soldier killed or maimed 10 are recruited after a fight; and here in the north, where boy line soldiery are all of the. same Shanttng, Chihli or Honan stock, it has become the habit of the victor to round up the straying sheep of the vanquished and expand the iectorious brigades into victorious ions. A>good many thousand of Wu Pei-fu's veterans are veterans of battles fought on the wrong side, voluntary spoils of war as it were.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.