The fiercely vocal agitation in Great Britain for the boycott of Japanese goods or for some form of economic pressure to be brought to bear on the Japanese Government is supported by well-meaning organizations and certain prominent men and women in British public life. The British Government has firmly refused to countenance the movement and may, eventually, take specific action tol correct developments which might accrue from it. Industrial and commercial opinion does not favour direct action of that kind and China would be wise to reject any suggestion that such abstention is purely clique, has launched a large-scale military and naval war of aggression on a neighbour who, faced with no alternative but to resist, is palpably the weaker party. Because, forsooth, the Government of China is open to certain criticisms, many of which might be applied with considerable force to other governments as well, because Japan's economic needs seem to suggest that the technique of the housebreaker would bring her) speedier relief than the devices of diplomacy, because in certain eventualities, remote and in essence problematical, Japan's strategic security demands the power to control China's northern territory, the invasion of China by military, aerial and naval power has been accomplished. From Tokyo the word is sent forth that China has to be "beaten to her knees." That inconvenient statement of the facts is even now being ignored by too many foreign observers. They will be further encouraged in thus dismissing the eternal verities of right and wrong—without observance of which neither civic, nor national, nor international life can remain intact—if responsible opinion is to be side-tracked, as must happen when the inefficient processes of mob-oratory and mass demonstration are applied to the discussion of the highly intricate and controversial issue of aerial bombing. Reduced to its simplest proportions, Japan's declaration that she wages war to exorcise communism, anti-Japanese feelings and corruption from the Government of China implies that the powerful nation has the right to chastise a weaker neighbour merely because that neighbour's standards of efficiency and ethics do not conform to some arbitrary doctrine of respectability. Meanwhile any doubt of the infallibility, perfection. or capacity of the would-be instrument of chastisement has to be stigmatized as lose majesty or a sin against impeccable rectitude. Those who are rightly concerned lest Japan's grave breach of a fundamental canon of international conduct may pass unchallenged should tenaciously adhere to that vital issue and should not allow themselves by confusion of thought to be lost in a maze of irrelevancies oe
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.