Tientsin, Aug. 1.
The activities of the Salvation Army in North China were subjected to close questioning when Japanese Gendarmerie officers examined high officials of the Army in Tientsin, Peiping and Peitaiho yesterday.
The Salvation Army has neither reported nor complained to the British authorities regarding the action of the Japanese Gendarmerie, and the British Consul-General here, interviewed on the matter today, preferred to make no public statement.
While leading officers of the Salvation Army in Peiping were requested to visit the Gendarmerie headquarters there to report on the organization's activities, in Tientsin several Japanese dressed in plainelothes visited Ad-jurant Rhth Hummerton at her house in the British Concession and closely questioned her.
The callers were very polite, and Miss Hummerton readily supplied all information, maintaining the stand that there was nothing to conceal.
Five other British offücers of the Salvation Army, including three women, all residing in the British Concession, and Major and Mrs. G. H. Walker, who are at present at Pei-taiyo, were similarly visited and interrogated. E Asserting that it "receives funds regularly from London," the Salv: tion Army is branded by the "Peking Chronicle" as -"being rather sympathetic with anti-Japanese elements in the past."—Reuter, Tokyo, Aug. 1.
Britain would be "extremely irrelevant" if she took retaliatory action against Japan for arresting British subjects in Japan alleged to be engaged in sabotage, the Navy spokesman, Captain Yuzuru Okuma, told the press here today.
Describing the arrest of British subjects in Japan as "just house cleaning." the spokesman said the campaign was entirely an internal affair.
Referring to the case of the late Mr. Melville J. Cox, Reuters' chief correspondent in Japan, who was killed when he fell from the third story of a building where he was being questioned by the gendarmerie early this week, Captain Okuma said it "would cause lots of trouble if foreign correspondents indulged in activities beyond legitimate bounds," He expressed his regret r the?tragic end of the correspond-. ent. however.—United Press.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.