Whether the country is actually in a state of war again or not, is not clear, but the portents are ominous. The first indication.came last Thursday in the holding up of Chinese ships at Shanghai on. a scale which appeared far beyond the ordinary trooping that might have been required by the change of command in Hupeh, Next day there was a report of fighting having actually begun on the Lung-Hai railway, but this may have been no more than a brush with bandits, easily magnified into something more serio' The news that General Yon Hsi-shan had telegraphed to General Chiang Kai-shek calling upon him to resign, however, points to something very grave. We have not yet received the text of General Yen's telegram, but the indications are that he charged General Chiang and the Nanking Kuomintang with being the cause of all the recent ternal strife. General Chiang replied with a point-blank refusal; and this was followed by the: message, of which we published a translation yesterday from Messrs. Tan Yen-kai, Wang Chung-hui and Hu Hai min, who lectured General Yen severely on the impropriety of his conduct, and roundly taxed him with seeking to stir up the trouble which he accuses others of making. Such telegrams certainly do nothing to promote peace. The only hope lies in the fact that during the past twelve months, although there has been fighting enough in all conscience, there have been equally bitter telegrams exchanged without actually leading to blow: a report that the of trouble in the present instance are Generals Han Fu-chu and Shih Vu-san, who, dissatisfied with their portion in Honan and northern Anhui, which have been so fought over and. pillaged by bandits be no inheritance worth having by anyone, have gathered up the leaderless remains of the Kuomin chun and intimidated or cajoled General Yen Hsi-shan into. bestowing a benediction on them and supplying them with a pretext for a descent upon the more fruitful fields of the Yan; tze Valley. But when we begin to look into the causes of all the turmoil of the past twelve months, or of any particular aspect of it, one cause is found to undercut another and in turn to be undercut by a third and we are lost in a maze of argument and retort. If we look at things purely from the standpoint of Nanking, we got one explanation, But if we look at them from that of the whole of China, the values are changed immediately. The enormous size of the country and the completeness of the destruction of all organized government increases, the need of a comprehensive view with reasonable allowance for local conditions. The doctrine of unification by force will never succeed. It has been tried again and again for eighteen years past and always it has failed. The explanation is seen by one glance at the map of China, the geographical centre of which lies close to Lanchow.
a military axiom—that. Russia can never be conquered, nor could America, on account of their vast bulk. The same difficulty blocks the unification by force of China, At the Financial Conference of July, 1928, Canton said plainly that she had spent more on the Ni tionalist campaigns than anyone else and must keep her revenues for herself. And the Northernevs undoubtedly consider that they above all others bore the brunt of the fighting with Chang Teo-lin: and brought about the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.