Quite apart from the political significance: of Gen. Yang's statement, conjectural or real, the writer has learned through haphazard talks with foreigners of all classes and nationalities here that these remarks of Gen. Yang's are considered "the limit?' and that they can very fittingly be used as the text for a sermon to Chinese officialdom at large much franker and much more pointed than that embodied in the Lincheng note. The trend of this sermon, which the writer presumes to assure his readers is 2 true synopsis of official and unofficial foreign opinion in the North, would be about as follows:
"All this outery about China's sovereign rights is sheer nonsense. China hasn't any. She has long ago sacrificed them. Anyone who can or will come into China now and can or will give the Chinese people a decent Government and an opportunity to live, move and -have their being, has a much better right to come in and administer such 2 Government than the Chinese "Government,'' Chin-* ese officialdom at large, the Chinese people (wherever they are), the merchants, the students, or any other class that we can think "No rights are inherent in either Governments or individuals unconditionally. All rights. are etnditional and all] rights have to: be earned All rights are conditional upon the discharge of certain fundamental obligations. By way of illustration we might point out that Thomas Jefferson, in drafting the Declaration of Independence, worte that all man were entitled to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, but that this did not deter the newly born American Government from providing gaols, asylums, workhouses, reformatories, penal colonies and what not within which a certain proportion of all communities were drastically denied the elemental rights—some of life, others of liberty, and the majority of the pursuit of happiness as they conceived it. There Was no inconsistency in_ this. When Jefferson said that all men were entitled to these fundamental rights, he took it for granted that every sane man would understand that all rights are conditional. The man who has a mania for taking life without rhyme or
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.