Sept. 18.
More than two months have yy, passed since Mr, George L. Shaw of Antung was arrested by the Japanese. It was on July 11 that he was allowed to enter Korea without a passport and seized on attempting to leave it for not having one. On July 31 he was removed from Shingishu to Seoul. So far as we are aware he has never yet been brought before any kind of court for so much as a preliminary hearing or an exact statement of the charge against him. Yet he has been consistently treated as a common criminal if not worse than a criminal. His case has aroused strong indignation in practically all the foreign Press of the Far East and was, on August 18, the subject of a strong letter of protest from the British Chamber of Commerce to Mr. C. F. Garstin, then Acting Consul-General in ghai. Yet at the moment of ing there has been vouchsafed neither any news of the date of Mr. Shaw's trial nor the slightest indication of what the British authorities are doing in a case which contains elements of gross injustice in itself and, in principle, gravely affects British prestige in the Far East. In passing, one of the most curious episodes in the whole affair was that on August 9, nearly a month after Mr. Shaw's arrest, a question was asked in the House of Commons about his quite proper refusal to allow the Japanese to search the str. Kueilin at Antung, but not a word was said about his imprisonment. Had not the Government heard of it?
The British community of the Far East desires and has a right to know what its representatives are doing on behalf of Mr. Shaw. For the injustice of his original arrest and treatment grows worse with every day that he languishes untried in the Seoul gaol. Two statements have been made by the Japanese which sufficiently indicate their consciousness of the extreme weakness, to use no harsher word, of their position. In the first of these, dated Seoul, August 10, it was said:—r. Shaw used to declare his sympathy with the Korean malcontents, house was known among the Korean outlaws as "the invincible fortress of Antung". he entered Korea on July 11 to meet his Japanese wife and was significant to notice that there is no mention of the fact that he was arrested when leaving Korea, having been allowed to enter, without passport, obviously in order that he might be caught. But the statement issued in Tokio on August 13 by the For-ion Office puts the Japanese authorities in an even less agreeable light.
As a result of his examination (at the police" station when found without passport) Mr. Shaw war snsnected on many evidences of siding outlawed Koreans... The Chief of Police, therefore, decided to detain him for 14 days... On forther examination it became plain that Mr. Shaw sympathized with the Korean independence agitation and had aided conspiracy for that and.
Here we find a clear and presumably deliberate attempt to make out that Mr. Shaw's alleged-connexion with the Korean Nationalists was only discovered after his being detained for the technical fault of having no passport. Between August 10 and 13 the Japanese Foreign Office had begun to realize that the dirty trick played on Mr. Shaw at Shingishu was bringing a good deal of obloquy on Japan, and they accordingly endeavoured to show that there had been no trick at all. As usual with such subterfuge, they merely made matters worse for themselves.
No protestations by Japan, after the event, as to Mr. Shaw's alleged intrigue with Korean revolutionaries can affect the vital and very serious point at issue. Tf, as the Foreign Office at Tokio pretend, his complicity in Korean plots was only discovered after his arrest, he ought to have been handed over at once to the British Consulate at Mukden, the offence not having been committed on Japanese soil. If it was known or suspected before his arrest, as the Seoul authorities aver, then they should have proceeded against him in the British Consular Court. But the Japanese behaviour is merely sui genesis and need not detain us further.
What we have to protest against now is the failure of the British Government to secure at least the surrender of Mr, Shaw to one of their own courts in the more than two months that he has been in gaol. If the Japanese are suffered to do with Mr. Shaw according to their pleasure, no British subject who speaks or writes in a manner displeasing to Japan in any part of the world is henceforward safe if he gets within the clutches of her police. And among the Chinese irreparable damage has been done to British prestige. A few days ago the "Peking Daily News' wrote The (Mr. Shaw's) case is a test case for British diplomacy in the Far East. If it will put up with this it will put up with anything, and we have either the measure of the blighting influence of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance or of the ignor minions discomfort that unequal yoke has brought both to British authorities and to British communities generally in the Far East, Mr. Shaw's case too sue rests the question how far British support for this country, when she rightly desires anything that conflicts with Japan's ambitions, is worth anything.
That is not pleasant reading for British readers, and the worst is that they cannot, unfortunately, be surprised at it.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.