no China in the political sense. There are merely groups of politicians of varying degrees of inefficiency, self-seeking and worse, who succeed each other in the seat of nominal] Government like mites in a cheese. Nothing whatever can be done with such men, least of all by giving them momen or money's worth (ie. freeing the revenues now pledged from debt). It is for the people of China to deal with them, and, until then, for the for eigner to button up his pockets. That might mean revolution and even intervention. But it would be for the first time a revolution in which the business classes of China had a living interest and the intervention, if necessitated, would frank and open, not a thinly disguised attempt to govern China through a parcel of puppets, which would deceive nobody. Mr, Arn hold is, of course, far too clever a man. not to know all this as clearly as we and numbers of other people do—business men, not just journalists. But having had to sponsor the surtax resolution at the conference, he is probably as much irritate ed by his own secret perception that it was a Very bad one as at having the weakness of his position exposed, first by us and then by the chairman of the Hongkong Shanghai Bank.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.