Mr. Roy. Anpsrson has travelled so extensively in China and learnt so much at first hand of her people and politics that we are reluctant to join issue with him on questions connected with this part of the worl But no time must be lost in expressing entire disagreement with and reprobation of the article by him in the New York World,"' of} which Reuter sends us a summary to-day. It is, perhaps, only a coincidence that the Far Eastern Review for this month gives prominence to an article headed The Crime against America,'' which describes how a group. of Americans in Peking have been plotting to force the} American people to take up arms against Japan in-order to right the grievances of China against that nation.'' Our contemporary takes the responsibility for its own statements in this respect and we should be sorry to think that Mr. Roy Anderson was implicated in a plot such as that detailed. But whatever his intentions may have been, his attempt to revivify the ancient bogey of Japan's hostile designs against the United States is as deplorable as we believe it to be unjustifiable.
Setting aside the familiar and facile generalizations on which such scares are usually based, Mr. Roy Anderson is seriously at fault in one most important premise. The White Guards, he says, will. probably start trouble von the Chinese Mastern Railway before Christmas, whereupon Japan will intervene with the ostensible object of protecting China from Bolshevik invasion, but in reality. to possess herself of the railway: and then America will be bound to come in. Now Mr. Roy Anderson's article must have appeared during the first eek in November. But the Japanese evacuation of Vladivostok was practically completed by October 25 and on October 81 the American Legation in Peking was addressing a note to the Waichiaopu on the new set of circumstances created by Japan's withdrawal and, in particular, on the status of the C.E.R. Surely these facts must have been known to Mr. Anderson. He may ronly that Japan's descent on the C.E.R. will be
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.