What Delays Disarmament?

I

EVERY civilized man wants peace. But peace has its price, payable in two installments. The first installment is disarmament. The second consists of all the consequences, political, economic, religious, and racial, which must flow from the laying down of arms. Nine tax-payers out of ten sigh for the privilege of paying the first installment at once. But are they willing to pay the balance of the bill?

This is the world’s gravest question to-day. It must be faced and answered before the close of the Washington Conference. Thus far it has been evaded. Most people, who are always looking for a panacea, dream that disarmament alone will bring the Golden Age. Others, more canny, admit that the move may involve some unpleasant changes, but they belittle these. Only a few thousand bankers, international traders, and political specialists foresee some of the startling transformations that must ensue. And nobody knows all the impending upheavals.

It is these certainties and uncertainties that cause well-informed men, who have no interest in bolstering up militarism, to doubt the wisdom, as well as the possibility, of quick disarmament. They all know that the Conference will make no effort to disarm the world, but will only reduce army and navy expenses; which, as one close thinker remarked, ‘will bring disarmament about as fast as a cheapening of automobiles will abolish transportation.’ Many foreign observers no longer believe that even such a reduction of costs is the primary aim. They see America striving to force Japan’s hand by compelling her to define her Asiatic policies under the pretext of a peace move. Lieutenant-General Sato advises the Japanese Government to send no men of the first rank to the Conference, ‘but only those who are fluent in foreign languages,,and sociable.’ For, in common with some French critics, he thinks the whole affair will dwindle to a string of brilliant dinners and press-agent hurrahs. Behind their caustic doubts lie many hard facts too jauntily overlooked by most peace-lovers. The longer we shut our eves to them, the longer we must wait for world peace.

The Conference faces six obstacles of the first magnitude — and heaven knows how many lesser hindrances. By all odds the greatest is the chaos in China. Next ranks the chaos in Russia, coupled with Russia’s absence from the arms parley. The third is a profound dilemma in Japan’s national policy; the fourth a similar one in our own, and both dilemmas aggravated by the lessons of the World War. The fifth is the still unbroken power of the militarist party in Japan. And the sixth is the sheer physical impossibility of devising a disarmament programme that will affect equally or equitably all participants. Probably no one or two of these obstacles would suffice to thwart the Conference. The menace lies in all six working in conjunction and reinforced by a host of lesser difficulties, economic, political, and social, the whole tangle involving billions of human beings, billions in money, a hundred theories, and a hundred aspirations and prejudices of race and creed.

Is not the task too great for the mind of man? Is it not one which only a politician would rush at hopefully t Whether we think so or not, one thing is pretty clear: the organization and the membership of the Conference betray an amazing neglect of the inmost nature of the Pacific problems. To realize this, one need only recall the following facts.

The invitation to the Conference made clear that, until the nations of the Pacific reached some understanding as to their rights and policies in that area, it would be vain to move for disarmament. The stakes are too huge, the conflict of interests too acute, the disparity of ethical and political codes too gross. This view was promptly accepted by almost every statesman at home and abroad. It is axiomatic, in spite of the sentimentalists and ignoramuses who say that wars are caused by talking war, that the way to disarm is to disarm, and that America must lead the world in idealism — whatever that may mean. Let us see how President Harding applied this statesman-like principle.

All major problems of the Pacific, save that of Asiatic emigration, centre in China and Siberia. There lie, still barely scratched, the world’s vastest treasuries of raw materials, the greatest forests on earth, the hugest coal-fields, stupendous iron-deposits, millions of acres that some day must yield wheat and cotton. There too swarm some four hundred million unappeased consumers of manufactured goods, a multitude greater than the combined populations of Western Europe, North America, and Australia, with Japan thrown in for good measure.

China and Siberia are richer in economic resources and in man-power than all these lands. Beside them, all the rest of the Pacific area is rather insignificant. They are the two problems of the Pacific. But neither China nor Siberia can be reckoned with at the Conference. Neither will be truly present. there. Neither will be able to present or to defend its rights and policies. And there is not the remotest chance that either will like the decisions of the foreigners.

Here, then, is the comedy, and here the stuff of which tragedies are woven. Briton, Yankee, and Japanese meet to usher in world peace. They dare not discuss laying down arms until each knows what the other two are planning to do with the Far East. What each can there do depends in the long run upon the wishes of the Chinese and Siberians, unless these peoples are to be overawed by force. If thus bullied, Asia will see no disarmament, nor can America. If bullying ceases, China and Siberia will automatically settle their own destinies; for they will then have the freedom to do so, as well as the desire.

Thus the Washington Conference must choose either to disarm and leave Asia to the Asiatics, or else to run Asia and maintain immense fleets. The first alternative wrecks the policy of every non-Asiatic power. The second makes the Conference futile. Lacking the moral courage to solve this dilemma, the delegates may dodge the problem of disarmament and confine themselves to the task of trimming budgets. But even this develops painful difficulties.

II

Look first at the chaos in China, around which all other difficulties revolve. That land is rotting, politically and socially. It is an indescribable pandemonium. Famine, pestilence, civil wars, and the alien enemy at the gates have undermined its frail structure of state. Corrupt politicians and foreign adventurers prey upon the weakened members. And the masses sink deeper into the sleep of opium, while the classes burn with a new hatred of the foreigners who contribute to the ruin.

Two governments wave their banners, one at Peking, the other in Canton. And a third is struggling to be born at Hupeh. The Peking affair is a scream. Led by President Hsu Shihchang, a gentle philosopher and poet of renown, it is the vilest militarism in all the world to-day. Honest, noble, and unworldly, Hsu was cleverly chosen by a bogus legislature made up of the henchmen of China’s two mighty war lords, Chang Tso-lin and Tsao Kun, who are busy making money at the country’s expense. Hsu is not a party to their disgraceful ventures and treacheries. He protests much, and sometimes manages to thwart them for a time, in lesser affairs. But, as they control the armies and collect taxes and play practical politics with veteran skill, Hsu disturbs them little.

Only three or four of China’s eighteen provinces even feign to obey Peking. In reality these do not, for they are the domains of the t hree war lords who created Hsu’s regime. Hsu gets taxes and obedience from them only when the war lords feel like contributing either, which is not often. Last July, Chang Tso-lin, being short of change, pocketed the salt revenues of Manchuria, where he rules. The tuchun (military governor) of Shantung recently appropriated the post-office receipts. In three other provinces, the retiring officials were graciously permitted to take with them considerable funds from the treasury. And thus everywhere and always.

The result is chronic bankruptcy at Peking. Troops go unpaid for months. Sometimes they mutiny, as at Ichang and Wuchang, last summer, where they pillaged terribly. To check such outbreaks, Hsu has raised money by ‘diverting’ the educational appropriations. For nine months teachers have gone penniless, and the schools have been closed by a teachers’ and students ’ strike. These funds being lamentably inadequate, the Government has lately pressed the Chinese Eastern Railwayfor a twenty-five-year-old debt, and has allowed that company to pay up with a bond issue, put out on such terms that only the Japanese would consider buying it, and they not for profit so much as for political reasons. At the same time Hsu and his Cabinet have been making desperate economies in small matters. Their auditors have found 1256 office-holders in Peking drawing two or more salaries; the ministers are reorganizing their staffs downward, and some high officials have been invited to accept half-pay. All of which does not improve Hsu’s credit at the banks, as we mark in his emergency loan of a million dollars last summer, on which he was obliged to pay 18 per cent interest. The only wonder is that the financiers did not demand 50 per cent.

The Cabinet and departments are befuddled and disorganized past all belief. They appeared at their worst in the recent, radio dispute. Seemingly, the Government had granted three wireless concessions to as many parties, all overlapping and incompatible. The fact was, though, that no Government granted any concession. The Ministry of the Navy entered into an agreement with the Mitsui Company in 1918. The Ministry of War did likewise with the Marconi Company in 1919. And last January the Ministry of Communications followed suit with the Federal Wireless Company, an American concern. The first two agreements carried plain monopoly rights, and it was this fact that caused our State Department to protest. An investigation showed that each ministry serenely ignored, or else knew nothing about, what the other two were doing; and neither President nor Cabinet checked up on the ridiculous performance. Which moves us to quote the old China trader’s remark on Chinese politics: ‘When you are through fighting for the Open Door in China, you ’ll open it and find nobody at home.’

So shaky is this rag-doll government of Peking that, before these lines are printed, it may be a thing of the past. What follows it will depend chiefly upon two men, Chang Tso-lin and Sun Yat-sen.

The Canton government is a model of neatness and strength beside Hsu’s. And its founder commands respect even among his opponents. President Sun is pretty generally regarded as a patriot of high intelligence, and the vital force behind the New China. For a decade he has championed a genuine democracy, and has drawn to his side many of the best minds. Unhappily, though, the masses have not seen fit to follow the best minds — a familiar habit of masses everywhere. The ordinary Chinese has no interest in politics, which he looks upon as a somewhat shady business, less profitable than peddling opium, and less agreeable than gambling. The people who count in politics are the hordes of small office-holders, who look to it for a livelihood, the thousands of poppy farmers, who need political protection, and the corrupt mandarins and tuchuns, who subsist on likin, ‘squeeze,’ and simple ‘appropriation.’

Now all these worthies fear Sun, and either oppose him, use his movement for their own ends, or else hold aloof, under the pretense of favoring provincial autonomy instead of a strong central government . Many Europeans and Japanese in the treaty ports dislike Sun for reasons only a degree nicer. Some brand him as a Bolshevik and accuse him of playing Lenin’s game.

This is absurd. Sun stands for the simple democracy which Americans believed in half a century ago. He thinks the ideals of Lincoln; and he is paying the price in much bloodshed and dubious progress. The Canton armies have been fighting steadily for many months, have scored brilliant victories in Kwangsi and the Yangtze districts, but still control little more of China than the northern Government does. To be sure, twice as many provinces have declared for Sun as have sided with Hsu; but with their favor goes no true control. Sun does not truly govern even his own province of Kwangtung, whose tuchun, Chen Chiung-ming, is the commanderin-chief of the Constitutionalist army recruited from five provinces. Chen levies taxes and hands over such funds as he sees fit to the Canton Republic. The Republic, as matters now stand, is nearly as poor of purse as Peking; and were Chen to reduce his bounty, Sun would have nothing to fall back upon save the contributions of Chinese nationalists abroad, the very groups who financed the revolution. There is no reason for believing that Chen will with draw support; but it is important to keep in mind that the Republic, with all its virtues and fine aspirations, owes its very existence to an enlightened tuchun, who may break with Sun almost any day on some new political issue. Such a break may come over the issue of provincial autonomy, which finds its most ardent champions in the five provinces that support Sun. Provincial autonomy is a fact, and many sincere thinkers wish to make it the basis of Chinese policy. Each tuchun dominates his province and is a law unto himself, thanks to his control of troops and taxes. As most provinces are fully as large and as rich as France, a tuchun is comparable to a pre-war European potentate, but with the powers of an Asiatic despot. Several tuchuns have made millions by trafficking in opium. Others sell concessions. Not a few have levied tribute on subjecttowns under one pretext or another. And all maintain their rule by force. Their armies now number about 1,700,000, or an average of nearly 100,000 active soldiers under each tuchun. Naturally the tuchuns tend to favor the division of China into eighteen nations, with themselves as lords and emperors. Why should anybody else approve? Simply, because China is too huge, too immature politically, and too inchoate, to think and act as a unit.

The political realist has often noted that this land should be thought of, not as an ordinary single country, but rather as a backward continent containing widely differing races and economic divisions, more or less like Europe of the seventeenth or eighteenth century, when there were no railroads, posts, telegraphs, or sense of community. China as a whole is surely less of a political entity than Europe was when the Treaty of Utrecht was signed. Yunnan has less in common with Manchuria than Portugal then had with Sweden; and the wider conflicts of interest between North and South are quite as acute and as stubborn as any between 1 he popes and the emperors or theHapsburgs and their many foes. Most important of all, the level of political intelligence in modern China is certainly lower than that of Western Europe three centuries ago. And nobody who understands the origins and nature of political intelligence believes that the Chinese can rise much faster than Europeans have risen. You do not make men good citizens by building railways through their farms. You do not produce statesmen merely by installing telephones in the offices of senators. Slow experiment by trial and error, still slower education of millions, slow crushing of superstitions, slow refinement of tastes and desires —out of such stuff is citizenship made. And this process must work from the home and the village outward and upward.

The people who dwelt between Dublin and Constantinople when the Treaty of Utrecht was signed could not have been organized into one successful State by the greatest of political geniuses. Even to-day their descendants cannot create the United States of Europe, which is the only sure salvation for that wretched continent. Geographical differences, many languages, race-prejudices, childish nationalistic fancies, and grave economic conflicts still keep the European masses ignorant, provincial, and befuddled. How hopeless, then, to expect that the eighteen provinces of China, with their 350,000,000 mediæval folk, mostly destitute of all t he tools of civilization, can combine under one government, which will work even as smoothly as a backward European nation!

While this powerful argument for provincial autonomy makes headway, the vast rim of China lapses deeper and deeper into simple anarchy. Civil wars — four violent — in the past six months; famines unparalleled, pestilence, and the interminable border warfare lawlessly carried over into Mongolia by the Russian reactionaries under Semenoff and Ungern, have shattered what frail web of law and order once hung over the western and northern fringes of the chaotic kingdom. The river pirates are looting junks and barges again. The robbers have come down from the mountains. And in great hordes the hunghutze (professional Manchu robbers) are marauding across Manchuria. On the borders of Tibet bandits have baffled and beaten the soldiers of the tuchuns. Out of Mongolia, but a few months past, the rabble trailing the fanatical Living Buddha came within a day’s march of the gates of Peking. Harbin, at the date of this writing, saw thousands of hunghutze drawing near. And for a year, or longer, the Chinese Eastern Railway has been attacked and plundered almost daily by these same outlaws, whom the Chinese troops dare not defy, knowing that many of them are working for certain Japanese adventurers and others for the Russian reactionaries, all clients of the mighty tuchun, Chang Tso-lin.

This red arc of ruin spans the two thousand miles that lie between Vladivostok and the frontier of Burma. It has paralyzed trade on a thousand highways and driven the boatmen from the rivers. Even between large cities travel is so hazardous that local officials forbid foreigners to attempt it, and require native merchants to take along armed guards in such numbers that only the most urgent mission can justify the cost. It is the thirteenth century on the miry roads of England; night, and a dark forest ahead.

III

While China crumbles, a plan grows in the north. If only half successful, it will shake the world before many years have gone. No outsider knows its details, for they seethe in the cunning brain of Chang Tso-lin, inspector-general of Manchuria, the power behind Peking, and the most sinister and strenuous of the war lords. Chang rules from Mukden of bloody memory, where he holds the most strategic position in all Asia. His is the rich land where Russia, China, and Japan meet in their struggle for existence. Manchuria dominates Peking, Vladivostok, the Trans-Siberian Railway, the Amur River Valley, and Korea. It is the gateway from China to Siberia, from China to Japan, and from Japan to Mongolia and world-power. Chang sits at the gate and collects toll, such as the traffic will bear.

The traffic bears a good deal, and the proceeds have gone to Chang’s head. He dreams of empire. Some observers have imagined that he would be monarch of all China; but Chang is too shrewd for that; and if he were not, his shrewder Japanese backers would halt him. His vision is much more practicable, hence more dangerous. He sees a new Manchu-Mongol Empire, st retching from the sea to the core of Asia. On Manchuria and Mongolia Chang would rebuild the throne of Jenghiz Khan,and send the bill to the Japanese. He will sell to the Japanese, at their own terms, a thousand concessions; and on his coronation day Japan will occupy peaceably a wedge twenty-four hundred miles long, giving them ‘interior lines’ dominating both Siberia and China. In short, what ‘little Hsu’ and his Anfuites dreamed of doing ‘for China,’Chang would do for himself and his Tokyo friends. The Japanese backed the Anfuites, and lost. Now they are backing Chang, and hope to win. And to-day the odds are strongly in their favor.

Three facts will convince you of all this. One is Chang’s military power, another is his management of the Peking Government, and the third is his long series of business deals with Japanese. It must shock the American reader to learn that this clever schemer now rules an army of 300,000 well-equipped soldiers, over which the so-called Central Government exercises not the slightest control, although it is compelled to pay most of its upkeep. Since Hsu demobilized some 300,000 of the Peking forces last summer, Chang has become the overshadowing force; and not alone because his is the largest army in China. His strength flow? largely from three immense strategic advantages: adequate food-supplies within his own lines, the superior railway system of Manchuria, and the reserves of munitions held ready by his Japanese friends in Manchuria and Korea. To all this, add a double geographic advantage: Manchuria is quite detached from the rest of China, hence not surrounded by potentially hostile provinces; and it is near the arsenals and shipyards of Japan. Why should not Chang dream of empire?

And how can the frail Hsu resist Chang’s demands? Dexterous, cunning, and strong of will, the uncrowned king of Manchuria manipulates his marionettes at Peking without an effort. His technique is too elaborately celestial to report here. Judge it by its fruits. Chang milks the treasury dry, plays off one clique against another, and traffics with the Japanese ‘going and coming.’ Week by week he sells off China’s assets and invests the proceeds in Chang. And all so quietly and suavely, that nobody quite knows what is happening until too late.

Last July Chang seemed to be desperately hard up. But of a sudden he handed over to his commissary general $2,510,000 in honest cash, albeit Mexican. This oddly coincided with his signing incorporation papers and concessions for a large Japanese development company in Mongolia; and it preceded by only a few days his shocking surrender of the Chinese Eastern Railway, through a shady bond-issue vote. Because of an old debt, conveniently overlooked for years, Chang’s Peking Government was able legally to demand the payment of some 13,000,000 taels from that road; and the road could pay only with a bond issue whose terms had to meet with the approval of t he Peking Minister of Finance anti the Minister of Communications — both Chang’s trained Pekingese. The issue was authorized in such a form that only Japanese would consider underwriting it, and they for political purposes.

At the date of writing, strong efforts are being made to block the issue. Whether they succeed or not, Chang’s intentions and methods remain clear. If he is thwarted here, it will be only for a while. Legally as well as factually, no man can launch an enterprise in Manchuria or Mongolia save by Chang’s leave. And Chang sees fit to favor the Japanese. Steadily since 1906 the Japanese have been pouring money into his domain. They have financed twenty-seven large corporations, mostly banks and the rest mining companies, lumber-mills, railways, and electrical plants. They show a gross authorized capitalization of 71,525,000 yen, a sum which means much more in that raw country of cheap land and coolie wages than twice as many dollars would mean to-day in our own country. Apart from its arithmetical significance, the investment acquires abnormal power from the protection against non-Japanese competition furnished by the Japanese authorities, as well as by Chang himself.

Manchuria being thoroughly in hand, Chang now prepares to absorb Mongolia. Circumstances played into his hand last spring, when the Siberian peasants and the Far Eastern Republic drove Ungern’s reactionary riff-raff all the way to Urga, in Mongolia. Ungern carried on a variety of still obscure schemes, now to capture Chita, now to attack Peking through the Living Buddha. Chang saw in Peking’s panic his own chance. Knowing, as every other well-informed person in the Far East knew, that SemenofF and Ungern were third-rate adventurers, with never a chance of wrecking the Chita Government, and that they were merely being used by a small clique of Japanese militarists as a means of bringing pressure to bear upon the Far Eastern Republic for the gaining of concessions, Chang nobly volunteered to drive the invaders off Chinese soil. It would cost Peking seven to ten millions, of course, but the job would be done with neatness and dispatch. Unhappy Hsu advanced three millions, then two more. Chang posted bulletins of his plans and progress. Months passed, and not a soldier moved. Chang had to wait till Japan was through with Semenoff. Finally, when the Japanese had kicked SemenofF out, and Ungern, his underling, had not even a broken reed to lean on, and the Living Buddha had wandered back into the windy solitudes, China’s great defender marshaled a mere handful of braves. Perhaps someof them are arriving in Urga now; and Chinese history will not run true to form unless, once in Urga, they stay there as long as Chang finds backing for his Mongol empire. They may be there when the second Jenghiz Khan enters in triumph, escorted by a purely honorary Japanese army. Who knows? Mad dreams do come true. And the truth itself is often madness.

IV

What has all this to do with disarmament? Well, each tendency in China’s chaos affects every foreign investor there. Each will do so much more after a disarmament programme, however modest, has been adopted. Now, the British investor in China largely shapes British policy toward China; and so too with the American and Japanese. Furthermore, disarmament hangs upon a prior understanding among the powers as to their Far Eastern policies. Plainly, then, every move toward disarmament must be determined chiefly by what foreign investors think of the drift in China. What must their thoughts be?

What if Chang has his way? Then Japan will become a colossal continental power as well as a maritime one. Her protectorate will extend first over Manchuria and Mongolia; next over Shantung; then probably over Kansu, whose tuchun is a friend of Chang, installed by Chang’s cunning. The Japanese militarist party will have justified its expensive policy. The price of conquest will be collected from the conquered, and Japan’s finances will be greatly strengthened. The present monopolistic policy of Japan, which has just been extended still further in Korea, will swiftly drive foreign investors out.

What if Sun Yat-sen prevails? Sun is an intense nationalist, aglow with the desire to free China from the alien. He hates Japan most, America least. In common with millions of his countrymen, he believes that the foreigner has caused most of China’s woes, and that expelling the money and the political influence of all foreigners is the first step toward national regeneration. Given full power, Sun would cancel or heavilyamend every foreign concession, put a quick end to extraterritoriality, restore the treaty ports to China, and finance the country from within. All of which would not encourage outsiders to drop money in Chinese ventures.

What if provincial autonomy arrives? The eighteen new nations would soon join in one or two loose confederations, but these latter would not hamper the new military kings. Forthwith, the statusof innumerable concessions would become dubious, for the central government which had granted them would have ceased. All would depend upon the good will, the cupidity, or the fear of the local tuchun. It would be Central Europe and the Balkans over again, but poisoned with mediævalism. Civil wars, intrigues, an endless unstable balancing of petty powers, and interminable uncertainty as to to-morrow would sap the courage of the boldest foreign investor and leave the field open only to the adventurer. Probably the treaty ports would thrive, for even the dullest war lord realizes that they are the life of their provinces. But all expansion beyond their environs would halt.

To all this, one exception. Japan would profit richly by the disintegration. She would sign treaties with the new northern kingdoms, paying gladly the tuchuns’ price. The technique followed in olden days by the British in dealing with the native states of India would be repeated, with modern variations and embellishments. And a quarter-century would see Japan the master of the continent.

Here are the three outstanding possibilities in China, in their baldest form. Each is little more than a possibility, as matters now stand. Chang will not have his way as sweetly as he hopes; for his countrymen understand him, and the Japanese behind him realize the danger of quick and open imperialism. Sun’s foes are many and mighty, while his purse is lean. And provincial autonomy is suspect because too many militarists are shouting for it, while clear thinkers understand that China must present a united front against Japan, or go under. Over and above all these restraints tower the battleships that ride in the harbors of Manila, Shanghai, and Hong Kong. These vessels are singularly unpopular among river pirates, opium smugglers, poppy farmers, white slavers, bandit chieftains, and exploiters white and yellow. All of which suggests a leading question. What if the Washington Conference, moved by lofty idealism, — whatever that may mean, — were to persuade the three dominant naval powers to scrap, let us say, one half of their fleets, or to cease new construction? How would that noble act affect Chang, Sun, and provincial autonomy? And how, in turn, the American, British, and Japanese investors in China? The answer is too easy. And it gives us a first clear glimpse of the obstacles to disarmament.

Cut the British and American fleets one half, whether by scrapping battleships or by suspending new construction, and you leave the coast clear for Chang and his Japanese friends to annex Mongolia and Shantung. They can and will double their speed of conquest on the day Anglo-Saxon sea-power dwindles. How so? Geography tells the whole story. From Japan’s huge naval port, Nagasaki, to the mainland of Asia is less than 150 miles — an easy night’s run for transports and battleships. The waters are dotted with islands which, fortified or used as bases for destroyers and submarines, make the passage fairly safe, even under heavy attack. Furthermore, the Japanese can mass in Korea and Manchuria millions of soldiers, if need be, long before a foreign power could effectively interfere. Military railways, warehouses, terminals, and other basic necessities of war, are already installed in vital points. And the farmers of Manchuria can now supply food for a sizable army. To all of which facts we need add but one, unsuspected by most Americans, perhaps, but recognized by all naval experts: neither the British nor the American fleet of to-day is strong enough to carry on a modern war anywhere in the Far East, chiefly because of the abnormally long and weak line of supplies and the distance from primary bases. The militarist party of Japan would rejoice at an international slashing of naval budgets, provided nothing was done to cut army expenditures and policies. Winning that, they will win Asia at a fraction of the price they had expected to pay.

After disarmament, Chang may turn the trick for Japan in three ways. He may allow her militarists to trump up a pretext for war, and he will offer only nominal resistance. Should Sun and his constitutionalists sweep the country, Chang might resort to this procedure; otherwise not. He will find it simpler to sell off the assets of China, as the Peking Government grows more and more desperate for funds; and thus, in a few years, Japanese buyers will own Manchu-Mongolia by the highly respectable right of purchase. Should this prove too slow, a third method remains. Chang may come out for provincial autonomy, after the battleships have vanished. He may retain sundry wise men, yea, even college professors, to demonstrate to a dubious world that this is China’s one true salvation. The wise men will cite the famous doctrine of self-determination. And they will make out an extraordinarily strong case; for, in the long run, provincial autonomy may really be the best solution. Chang of Mukden will secede from Chang of Peking. The new empire of the north will straightway enter into close alliance with Japan. And all will be over but the banzai.

Suppose finally that, after naval disarmament, Sun Yat-sen wins. What then? It is hazardous to make more than two broad conjectures, as the outcome of a constitutionalist victory must be highly complex. This much is sure, though: the restored Republic could not block Japan’s expansion in Manchuria and Mongolia, as it lacks railroads, finance, technical staffs, and general organization. And, with British and American navies negligible, Japan might declare war on a democratic China, on the ridiculous pretext that Sun is Bolshevist, precisely as it attacked the Maritime Provinces of Siberia. As for Sun himself, he would doubtless uproot British and American concessionnaires at a great rate, if not menaced by their battleships. And in this he would be aided by the fast-mounting hatred of the foreigner, among even the common folk of China.

Were disarmament to be followed bv provincial autonomy, it is doubtful whether even the lives of foreigners would be safe in most regions. The World War shattered the white man’s prestige and revealed the infamy of the Japanese militarists. China now follows Japan and India in her distrust of European civilization. The thoughts of Gandhi, the Hindu saint, and the poet Tagore are blazing up the dense valleys. The outcry against the Consortium, the thirty-million-dollar loan from native bankers to the Peking Government, last summer, and, above all, the wild enthusiasm in the south over Sun’s extreme nationalism, are a few gusts that scurry ahead of the great storm which must some day break, once the restraint of naval force is withdrawn. Everybody who knows China seems to agree that, in the chaos following the creation of eighteen kingdoms, the foreign devils would suffer first and foremost.

V

Thus far we have noted only internal tendencies in China. Is there not hope that the prospect will brighten when we consider other possibilities? May not Japan, reassured by Anglo-Saxon disarmament, forsake her militant ways in Asia? And if China, no longer threatened by her neighbor, continues chaotic, may not the powers join to put her house in order, under some benevolent scheme of international control? Alas for these hopes! The militarist party is still unbroken at Tokyo, and its counsel will prevail at the Washington Conference, where it will confound its adversaries with an argument borrowed from the very advocates of disarmament. Japan can defend her Asiatic policy with the greatest lesson of the World War. Her militarists can appeal to Mr. Frank I. Cobb’s vigorous and accurate statement of it, in the August Atlantic: —

‘Nations that are rich are not defenseless. They contain in themselves all the elements of defense. They may have been defenseless in times when war was the exclusive business of professional soldiers, but all that has been changed. The elements of national defense are now the sum total of all the economic resources of the country plus all the man-power. . . .

‘Economic resources can be easily and quickly translated into military resources; and a sound economic system is the essential element in any extensive military undertaking.’

Mr. Cobb correctly used this as an argument for America’s disarming. Japanese war lords can use it to demonstrate Japan’s need of dominating Manchuria and Mongolia, if not also a slice of Siberia. They can thus prove that their fatherland cannot even defend itself unless it acquires immense economic resources. To-day their country is perilously poor in the materials that make for strength. Her people no longer feed themselves, but import vast quantities of rice and millet. Most of her peasants make money only from silkworm culture. Unhappily, silk is a luxury whose value fluctuates widely, and imitations made from cotton already threaten its market. So a nation whose natural resources are mostly silkworms hangs by a thread. To survive, Japan must own coal, iron, copper, timber, cotton, and all the other ingredients of modern security and comfort. She will seek these even as Great Britain, France, and the United States do to-day. Failing to get them, she must join the ranks of pauper Italy and Greece. Economic expansion on a vast scale, or a surrender of national power — there is no third course!

Can any American or Briton soberly advise the Japanese delegates that they should show true moral grandeur by choosing the second alternative? And, if you once grant the right of economic expansion, where else would you have Japan expand, if not due west?

We come now to the proposed international control of China, which some observers feel would at once restore order there and hold the Tokyo militarists in check. Here is no place to debate the broader merits of the plan. We have only to note its relation to disarmament, which is as clear as sunshine. So sincerely do the Chinese hate foreign domination, that international management could succeed only if backed up by a large army and navy. The day t he first alien manager entered Peking, Sun Yat-sen’s strength would be doubled. To the 1,700,000 troops of the tuchuns would be added the might of armed mobs and bandits innumerable; and we should be committed to a new benevolent militarism for years to come.

This brings us to the one obstacle to world peace which lies wholly within our own gates. We have most of the world’s gold, most of the free capital, immense factories, and millions of skilled workers. The unbalance of trade has ruined our foreign trade with Europe; our exports and imports declined 50 per cent in the first seven months of this year; Germany is selling textiles 60 per cent cheaper than we can; German mills are underbidding Pittsburgh in our domestic steel market; our automobile factories are running at 57 per cent capacity; and five million workers are idle, as winter comes on. Meanwhile, taxes refuse to shrink, and battleships are being built, while our farmers sec their minute profits devoured by abnormal freight-rates and our builders touch only the most urgent contracts. There is but one escape from the deadly combination of war-debts, an over-expanded factory system, and a money glut. New markets must be tapped quickly, new consumers found, new desires created. But where and how?

Not in Europe, for Europeans are finding it hard enough to fill their stomachs; and they can undersell us at almost every point. Not in Russia, where none has a dollar save for black bread. Not in South America, whose buying power is probably less than that of Texas, in spite of the large claims of sundry bank presidents whose knowledge of that continent and its people appears to have been derived from grammar-school geographies and smoking-room tales. Where, then? There remains only the Far East. China and Siberia can absorb billions of capital, much of which, as Mr. T. W. Lamont remarked, must eventually earn a thousand per cent. They can also consume billions’ worth of manufactures; and, as their standards of living rise, those billions will become tens of billions. To those lands, then, our financiers and manufacturers must look for the only foreign trade that can restore our economic balance appreciably. Their logic is impeccable, granting the premise that we must look abroad for new markets.

But how dares any American financier invest millions in such chaos, where governments totter, intriguers plot new empires, and war lords revel in civil strife? Neither Peking nor Canton can protect him, and Tokyo will not. His alternatives, then, are clear: either he must have his own country protect him with as much force as is necessary, or else he must stay out of Asia. As for the manufacturer and the exporter, he is vexed by this same dilemma and two further annoyances. He must undersell the British, Germans, and Japanese in China; and this he cannot do now save in a few monopolistic lines, such as cheap automobiles and sewing machines. And even when he can meet their prices, he cannot reap their profits, because Great Britain and Japan have exempted their nationals doing business in China from all income taxes and excess-profits taxes on their China trade. But these worries pale beside the chaos in China.

This chaos creates for the Republican party a terrible dilemma. Champion of the full dinner-pail, roaring factories, and hundred-per-cent dividends,—all excellent ideals! — it has committed itself heart and soul to the utmost stimulation of foreign trade and foreign investments. Champion of general prosperity, it aims to reduce the cost of living, especially taxes, which are nine tenths military. The first goal demands a navy. The second demands the abolition of navies. And neither a navy nor an abolished one will guarantee success in the Far East!

Is it to be marveled at that some Republicans have lost interest in the Disarmament Conference, while others are losing sleep over it?

VI

Disarm and leave Asia to the Asiatics, or else run Asia and a huge fleet. This, when all is said and done, is the alternative that delays disarmament. It may be dodged for a while, but it cannot be evaded. It will not help to emit hypocritical shrieks over the wicked Japanese, whose imitation of our political ways is the sincerest. flattery. Nor will it serve any good end to shed crocodile tears over poor, down-trodden China, which is not a whit worse off than some of our own Southern states, man for man, road for road, town for town. Asia is Asia. It must work out its own salvation. Too far away and too huge to be controlled by us, who cannot even manage our own cities intelligently, its hundreds of millions can be swayed by us only under the compulsion of overwhelming force. They who are compelled will gain little. We who compel shall lose much in money and in reputation. Only a few exploiters, white and yellow, will emerge with riches.

Some influential Republicans understand this and are ready to accept its implications. But the majority seem still under the spell of economic imperialism, or else hypnotized by the Japanese bogey manufactured by our yellow press. And so, while they may cry for world peace and the prosperity it must bring, they thwart it by refusing to accept the consequences of disarmament. If the Conference fails, they will probably have to share the guilt with the extreme militarists of Japan.