The next fact to be considered is that, in exchange for connivance at leuch' a crime against the Chinese people the foreign delegates were to have received pledges of various sorts from the Chinese official caste and that the execution of these pledges would have entailed much more of a Government than anything that has existed in this country for ten years past. There is not the slightest prospect in fact that China can in the next ten years evolve a Government that could or would faithfully execute even the smallest of the pledges which the treaty contemplated exacting from hina in exchange for the capitalize ing of chaos.
It would take a really efficient and powerful Government, for me stance, to abolish Iikin in fact as well as name, not to mention such destination and consumption taxes as the illegal tobacco tax' which none of the recent Republican Governments of China has been able abolish in the city of Peking.
What possible chance was, there of consolidating an unsecured debt.
at™ least $800,000,000, with amortization running over @ period of 30 or 40 years, unless there were a Government' so firmly established and so powerful throughout the provinces that it could be relied upon to preserve throughout that veried the sanctity and integrity of the Customs Service? Even now there is no foreign banker in Peking who would consider the Customs Revenues adequate security for even the smallest loan on the guarantee of the Chinese Government alone, because all know that ft is the presence of foreign gun-oats in China waters that ensures Peking the collection of the Customs receipts and nothing else; and who knows if there are going to be foreign gunboats supervising the Peking Government's revenue collection ten years hence?
Lacking the guarantee of a real Government in China, what Powers are going to guarantee that the foreign supervision of the Collectorate and the loan service is. going to remain intact for another ten year, or even five years while they are bent upon "patient conciliation"? The whole idea was a its execution would have been a swindle to which the delegates would have been active parties had it gone through. Eight hundred mil-Tion dollars worth of new Chinese paper would have gone upon the market with the chops of China, Japan and most of the great Occidental Powers upon it, with no more real security behind it than vested in the Peking Govern ment's promise to pay, which ie acknowledged to be worthless, or the Powers' willingness to inter vene forcibly in China to collect a debt, which is not worth much more as things stand.
Tariff Autonomy Finally the treaty would have embodied tariff autonomy and with no more responsible Government in China than those we have recognized "Jin the past, including those with which the delegates have had reason to become intimately acquainted, tariff autonomy would have meant to foreign traders in China just about what the local militarist's tax autonomy means to -the Chinese merchant and farmer in the interior —impositions that are so near to 1 conficeatory, that the difference does not make production worth while.
These are simple and obvious {facts which anyone who knows existing conditions in China understands without explanation, but when a body of diplomats, technical experts, lawyers and what not get together in an atmosphere of suspicion "and pretence, with "policy" as their watchword, and intellectual honesty at the e¢uneil table locked upon as an vnprofetsional and puerile weakness, the simple-and obvious things are die-cussed at informal meetings and whispered tete-d-tetes only; like something frivolous and indecent.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.