To the Editor of the "Norti-Catwa Dany News"
Sm,—Partisans of Japan have had a long and successful exploitation of the perverse logic that precedent is all that is required to vindicate any Japanese culpability, regardless of its degree and nature. Constant use or abuse has, however, taken all the edge off arguments on such a bessis. "SHANGHAILANDER," too, digs into the past to apologize for the present, forgetting that civilization is posed to be progressive and otherwise we might be still crawling on all fours.
To attribute the world-wide -indignation to Chinese propaganda is paying China a wholly unmerited compliment. Had China had anything like àn international publicity, things would have been quite different today. Reports on the aimless slaughters of civilians in "areas far or in some cases wholly removed from military objectives" (as your American contemporary has put it) have been based principally on independent foreign observers or eye-witnesses; and they have not been played up in Chinese papers to anything like the extent as in the foreign.
The British Reuter. reported from the German Scharnhorst the story of how a dozen fishing junks were sunk by a Japanese submarine with no attempt made to pick up a single victim among the 300 drowned; and the American United Press gave an eyewitness account from the British'
Kaiyn of the torpedoing of two Chinese junks by a Japanese destroyer. What hand had Chinese propaganda in those reports?
A matter "beyond the interests of any nationality," the British delegate at the League Committee and "silence would be accomplice to the crime," said the French. Though for "well-known reasons" Germany
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.