A great strategist, said "War is a continuation of policy." If this is so the judgment that dictates war measures should be the same as that that guides policy. Yet the explanation for the brutalities that have occurred seems to have been a wish "to strike terror into the hearts of the Chinese people," whereas instead so united a Chinese resistance has been created that the: policy has utterly discredited itself, on grounds of expediency if on no other grounds.
It is clear that Mr. Timperley believes the outcome cannot be altogether left to Japan and China. "What has happened, and is still happening, in China is something that New Fiction Mrs, Belloc Lowndes' book "Motive" (Hutchinson, London. 7/6) opens with a murder, Sir Thomas Clarkson is discovered with half his head shot away and Chase Bigland is convicted of murder on the rather flimsy grounds that he is in love with Sir Thomas's wife and was at a shooting party fifteen miles away when the murder was committed. At the last minute the real murderer confesses apd then commits suicide, and the police shield his reputation with the kindly fiction that the real criminal has escaped abroad. The characters are poor. Doris Klint is the most ins teresting. She is a widow of uncertain age and magnetic charm, for two men fall in love with her in three days. One is murdered and the other refuses to marry her when he hears that Doris is not all ihat she should be, which is tough on Doris because she had been looking for a husband for ten years, and, passionately as she had loved Sir Thomas, three days after his death she is even more passion ately in love with Dr. Raven, the coroner at the inquest. Dr. Raven is not above reproach himself, for when Doris confesses after a discreet dinner à deux that she has withheld important evidence at the inquest, he sends it to Scotland Yard in an anonymous letter to save Doris embarrassment. Then there are the three big-hearted boys: Chase Big-land, whó refuses to testify in his own defence lest the breath of scandal should sully the pure name of Lady Flora Clarkson; Sir Joseph Molloy, eminent K. C. whose joints are stiff with age but who yet manages to fall on his knees with tears in his eyes io tell Lady Flora that her lover has been released; and Col Wroxton. biggest hearted of the three because. world-famous sportsman as he is, he shoots Sir Thomas to end Lady Flora's unhappy married life. It is an incredible book which makes one think that the only thing that may reasonably deter us all from writing
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.