Happily the report of the Barnby Mission, as summarize? on the basis of material now to hand by the mail, so sedulously avoids political issues that its value as an jeconomie document can be freely examined. Circumstances have tended to obscure the fact that the Mission was concerned with 'Anglo-Japanese trade relations and not _merely with the information which it incidentally gleaned in the course of the journey to Manchuria. Critics who point to the! strict limitations of that journey' seem to be under the impression that Lord Barnby and his. colleagues were supposed to) combine commercial activities with a kind of revisionist imitation of [the Lytton Commission. In spite of the Irrelevancies of certain press comment in Manchoukuo and. Tokyo, Lord Barnby rightly ac-Jcepted the guidance of the Japan-Jose authorities who arranged the /Manchurian interlude. The Report gives an adequate account of economic conditions in Manchuria without pretending {0 pass judgment on political issues. Nor does it omit to note that persistence in developing the oil monopoly may powerfully deter foreign capital
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.