Our diplomatic agents in the apitol are freely confessing among themselves and to their intimate advisers a great many things which they are almost on the point of telling the word and which might be told the public ut large with considerable benefit to the Orient at large. The first of these would-be confessions is that the Lincheng sanctions, having been paved down, altered and emasculated to the nth. degree through the endless interchange of correspondence wth our several Home Govermments, are going to be utterly useless as de-torrents of China's marked downward tendency. So far as the bearing of the Lincheng repay tion scheme upon the general situation in China goes, it is a dead issue. The Home Lowers have cither insisted upon treating it as. local incident, instead of a symptom of conditions, or have tried to use it as am excuse to force pet claims. Those statesmen abroad who have been able to free themselves from the visualization of the Lincheng incident in its. purely local aspect, have been so firmly pledged to the forwarding of certain pee cular national interests in Chin that they cannot take_an expansive view of the situation if they would. No French statesman dare raise his_eyes above the Banque Industrielle and ''gold francs." British railway interests, backed by allied financial groups, have so firmly tuttonholed the British Government that it is impossible to get a word of anything but railway control in edgewise in London. In America the American Group's petty financial interests were promptly pushed into the immediate foreground the moment. that the first news of Lircheng was telegraphed across the Pacific and the claims of this group were so unfavourably received by American. public opinion that President Harding, with his eye upon a second term, did not dare to take chances with American public opinion on any Chinese issue.
The reflex in Peking from all these purely domestic Chinese reflexes in the Occident has been a state of profound melancholy in the Legation Quarter.. The unfortunate committee of seven, headed by Sir William Oudendijk, has had a particularly trying and thankless job. Each member of the committee understands, or profess to understand, the seriousness of the situation in Chinn. The reasonableness of every sweeping measure of reform in China suggested at the meetings is admitted by each and every member—''in principie''—but in each and every case, each member is forced to remark that while he is certain of his Government's approval he must have documentary authority. And in every instance in which author. ity is asked, each Government having some small bone to pick in China, hhs come back with a request for a guarantee of that particular Power's right to whiten the bone.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.