The fuller version of Mr. Koki Hirota's speech shows that he lays considerable emphasis on China's responsibility for the present crisis in Shanghai in that her Government has refused to follow Japan in endeavouring to arrive at "local settlements". This specious argument does not deceive the world although it may find an echo in the breasts of those who imagine that its acceptance might have spared them conerable loss and suffering. By endeavouring to secure regional or local settlements Japan has not only run counter to her own solemnly expressed desire to regard the Government at Nanking as the Central Government of China but she has presented China with the dilemma of having to submit to neal erosion of Chinese soil without ntee of finality to the process. If the. Central Government had acceded to Japan's terms for the local settle-nes arising out of the Marco Polo Bridge affair, would have been accused of having been false to its pledge to resist any further encroachment on China's territory. That being so the question arose where could resistance be best made having regard to the ico-military factors involved. The choice was taken in the Shanghai area, although that may have involved an apparent breach of the Shanghai truce of 1932 to which Great Britain was a party, as Mr. Hirota observes. The technicality irrelevant mainly because of the reality of Japanese aggression in the North and the attitude of the Government in Tokyo toward Chinese resistance to that aggression. It must also be remembered that the machinery set up under the truce to secure its faithful observance was virtually unused, except when the Japanese, to cover certain clearly-intentioned movements, desired to invoke its provisions and naturally failed to evoke enthusiasm in consequence, especially as their own divagations in Hongkew and Yangtszepoo ever since the truce was signed were little in accord with the spirit if not the letter of the pact. Mr. Hirota endeavours to exploit Shanghai's natural distress by throwing the blame on the Chinese authorities but he fails to realize that he is not talking in 1932. Then that facile argument had a greater appeal than it has today when the world has been able to study the relentless pressure of Japanese militarism on the whole body politic of China, When, for example, he accuses the Chinese Government of embarking "on an anti-Japanese campaign of the most vicious kind", he is -unfortunately banging a drum with a painfully big hole in it. The most potent disseminator of anti-Japanese feelings in China has been Japanese militarism itself and the voluble spokesmen who have in season and out of season arrogantly proclaimed its intentions,
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.