The test. of the merit of any suggestion made for improving conditions in China is that it must sooner or later induce force the Chinese to assume an discharge their own obligations. Apart from the political confusion in China the immediate cause of the prevalence of banditry and outlawry generally is the positive refusal of the men who have assumed high titles and have gathered big armies round them to assume any responsibility for the peace of their districts. As has been frequently pointed' out the worst conditions prevail in the provinces occupied by the most numerous and best equipped troops under the most competent military commanders. The conditions out of which such incidents as the Lincheng affair spring do not exist because the provincial authorities cannot suppress outlawry but because they will not. If the Legations backed by the Powers do not want to go any deeper into the nature of China's troubles than this, it is still obvious enough that any measure designed to restore and preserve order must be one which will persuade or force the military men who assume high titles to assume with the title the rule of keeper of the peace. The only alternative to such persuasion is an army of occupation which ill at once dispose of the mili tarists and restore order by actual campaigning in the interior. The local diplomatic folk are probably right when they say that neither the American public nor the wards of the British Exchequer will authorize this latter alternative now, but it it a sad commentary upon the ingenuity of our representatives here that they can conceive of no course, when note writing has brought nothing, but piecemeal intervention as a substitute for wholesale forceful occupation.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.