realized that we must be beaten by sheer numbers. The attacking battles in the spring of 1918 had completely exhausted the supplies which had poured into the ranks since 1914. Victory had been too much for the German nation. An officer of high

The Frankfurter Zeitung, June 8

rank bears testimony in the Militärwochenblatt to the real cause of our collapse: 'Our defeat has been so complete because the forces of the Central Powers have been overtaxed and completely exhausted by the pursuit of unattainable military and political aims.'

FEW people in Europe realize how momentous was the decision taken by the Council of Three in favor of Japan on the Shantung question. Without exaggeration, we say that it exceeds in importance all the other territorial adjustments made by the Conference, because of the area and population affected. No well-informed man can have any doubt that it will profoundly modify the history of the Asiatic continent, if not that of the whole world.

It is unnecessary to emphasize the justice of China's demands: they have never been seriously questioned even by the Japanese. Everybody admits that the territory of Kiaochau is in every sense purely Chinese; that the occupation by the Germans in 1898 was an act of violence; that by entering into the war on the side of the Allies, China nullified all her treaties. with Germany; and that the so-called agreements between Japan and China were forced upon the latter by threats of war. But Japan is strong and China is weak; it is much easier to sacrifice the latter than to offend the former. Great Britain and France were bound by a secret treaty to sup

port Japan, and President Wilson could not sacrifice his League of Nations, which would have been put in danger by the threatened withdrawal of Japan. There we have the whole story. Some people believe that in supporting the claims of the Japanese Great Britain must have decided upon a new foreign policy, which may have its ultimate object in diverting America's attention to the Pacific Ocean. Events will show the correctness of this view, which need not concern us here. Let us simply consider the necessary consequences of the decision taken.

The American communiqué said that Japan was to obtain all the rights formerly belonging to Germany, only as an economic concessionnaire, and that Japan voluntarily engaged to hand back the Shantung Peninsula in full sovereignty to China. Let us see how far are these statements from the truth. According to the same communiqué, Japan will have the right to establish a settlement in Tsingtau, the only port in Kiaochau, and to maintain a special police along the railway. In a country where the Japanese enjoy

extra-territorial rights, it means that the piece of territory beginning from the settlement where the railway starts and ending at the terminus, which is at present at Tsinan, the capital of the province, becomes virtually Japanese territory. It is true that many of these rights were possessed by the Germans; but then, Germany is thousands of miles away from China, and has many other interests to consider, while Japan is at our very door and can afford to give us all her unwelcome attention.

It will be easy for our French friends to understand if we take an imaginary case as an example. Suppose AlsaceLorraine were Japanese possessions. That would not diminish France's desire to regain her lost territory, but, obviously, it would not have the same political danger as the German occupation.

In fact, Shantung will become a second Manchuria, and, strategically, Northern China will be at the mercy of Japan; for from Tsingtau Japanese troops can reach Peking within twentyfour hours, and in less than half that time the trunk lines connecting the capital with the Yangtze Valley can be cut. Peking will be firmly grasped in a pair of Japanese pincers-Manchuria in the north and Shantung in the south.

Let us see the economic side. Japan, in spite of her organization, is a country without resources; she has only a few small coal fields, already rapidly becoming worked out, and practically no iron ore. Nothing made her realize her impotency more than when America prohibited the export of steel on entering the war. In recent years great efforts have been made to secure her needs at the expense of China. She had obtained already two big coal fields and a considerable iron deposit at the conclusion of the Russo

Japanese War. By presenting to China an ultimatum in 1915, she extorted from us one of the largest iron deposits, that of Anshan, on the South Manchurian Railway. She controls also some 450,000,000 tons of high-grade ore in the Yangtze Valley. But the Manchurian ores are mostly low-grade magnetite, partly unworkable, and the coal can be used only to a small extent for metallurgical purposes. Again, she possesses no coal field near enough to be employed for the smelting of the Yangtze iron ores.

The Peace Conference has given her 340,000,000 tons more of hematite ore and more than one billion tons of good coal, all near the railway, the extension of which will traverse three big coal fields containing billions of tons of coking coal within economic distance of the Yangtze Valley. Thus, as the result of the Paris Conference, Japanese monopoly of Chinese iron industry has been assured. The export of Chinese iron ore to Japan has been of extraordinarily rapid growth; before 1912 it was negligible, but it will probably reach a million tons in 1920. With the enormous advantages just acquired she will be able to increase this supply four to five times within the next ten years. Those who know the ambitions of Japan can hardly doubt that when she can build as many ships with her own steel as she likes, Japan will assume a different attitude toward such questions as racial equality, and Great Britain may have reasons to think differently of the value of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance as the means of safeguarding India.

So much for the material side. But the Japanese victory is by no means confined to it. What Japan has been striving for during the last few years is that she should be recognized by the powers as the only spokesman of

Eastern Asia. The famous twenty-one demands, the Lansing-Ishii Agreement, as well as the recent agreements with China, all point to the same effort to realize what is known as the Japanese equivalent of the Monroe Doctrine. Here, in a treaty to be signed by practically all the powers of the world, Japan is allowed to act as an arbitrator between China and Germany. Kiaochau, a piece of Chinese territory, is to be restored to China, not directly by Germany, with whom China is also at war, but through the hands of Japan. Thus a diplomatic precedent is created, the importance of which is hard to exaggerate.

What is China going to do? Now, in order to understand the psychology of the Chinese people at the present moment it is necessary to remember what happened during the war. During the decade before 1914 China had been comparatively free from direct military aggression. But the worldwar upset the balance of power, and Japan at once took the advantage. She showed her hand first of all by preventing China from entering the war in 1914. Then came the twenty-one demands and the subsequent ultimatum. The undisguised aid given to the Manchurian brigands in Shantung, and the Chungchiatung incident were but part of the same scheme. Every time the Chinese Government yielded against unmistakable public opinion; but the people remained calm, because they were told each time that their case would receive a just hearing at the Peace Conference. As the struggle became more and more intense, the utterances of the European statesmen maintaining that the war was a war

The Manchester Guardian, June 16

of right against might, and the highsounding idealism of President Wilson, attracted widespread attention and roused our national aspirations. The sympathy of the Allied diplomatic agents all over China, often openly expressed, encouraged us still more.

Rightly or wrongly, therefore, the Chinese people believed seriously that the downfall of Germany meant also the end of militarism all the world over, and the Peace Conference a unique opportunity for redressing our wrongs. Convinced of the justice of their their cause and confident of the sympathy of the Allied Powers, they put their case plainly before the Paris Conference. How thoroughly they have been disappointed is tragic history.

Now, the Shantung question is not one of amour propre for China. To her it is a matter of life and death. To allow Japan to remain in that province means to give away China's political and economic independence. Can anyone blame her if she becomes desperate in the agony of her soul? After all, it is better to die heroically than to drag on an ignominious existence. China is very weak, nay, almost defenseless, but she is not without a soul. Her people are afraid of neither death nor invasion, of which none has yet succeeded in destroying her nationality or her civilization. If she must submit to a foreign yoke, she will not do so without a struggle. Her only crime has been her weakness and her belief in international justice after the war. If, driven to desperation, she attempts something hopeless, those who have helped to decide her fate cannot escape a part of the responsibility.

ON READING ALOUD

To be able to read aloud well is a great accomplishment, though one which of late years has been undervalued. In the days when women spent a good deal of time by the fire, and took pleasure in needlework, reading and working and tea filled a pleasant afternoon. Many mothers read systematically every day to their children, and not a few men either listened or read aloud in the evening when they had nothing better to do. Some of the latter, though they were ready readers, were impatient listeners. They wanted to get on faster, they said, and the more the book interested them, the more they longed to take it out of the reader's hands. They were occasionally persons of dramatic gift, and perhaps their critical faculty as well as their impatience unfitted them for the part of audience. Generally speaking, however, women read the best, and scores of people remember now with peculiar vividness and pleasure the novels and the poetry which their mothers read to them in their teens. They preserve a delightful recollection of Scott, Thackeray, the Brontës, and Disraeli, even though they may confess that they never now take them down from the shelves. No one, we would remark by way of parenthesis, 'preserves a recollection' of Miss Austen. We believe she is the only great English writer of whom it might be said that no one ever read her with any appreciation and read her only once. Her lovers read her 'at intervals' all their lives.

But to go back to the art of reading aloud. The first essential is a pleasant voice. We have, however, known readers who fancied their own reading, and who possessed no other qualification. The effect was monotonous, and even soporific. We should say that the

two most difficult things to read really well are the newspaper and the Bible. The easiest thing to read is, of course, fiction. Poetry is difficult. Philosophy and other studious stuff requires little besides intelligence and practice. In this case, the listener wants nothing but to know what is in the book, and not to be irritated by stumbling or confused by obvious incomprehension.

To begin with the newspaper. 'But who wants to hear it read?' demands someone. Alas! there are just now a good many men among us who want very much to hear it read. Braille is not very easy to learn; not many papers are published in it, and we gather it is far more wearisome to read with your fingers than to listen. A really good newspaper reader must read fast, read clearly, and know how to skip. He must not get angry and ruffled because he does not agree with what is said. The very bits which rouse him may be those which his hearer likes. No intelligent listener, however, likes padding. An eye for padding, for reiteration, for safeguard sentences, and for dullness generally, is better worth having than a good voice. This sort of reading should never be in the least dramatic. The only object of the reader should be to make the listener forget that he has not got the print before him, to avoid his instinctive comment of 'Oh, get on!' and to leave him familiar with the morning's news and not ignorant of the policy of the paper.' All this is not easily done. In fact, to read a newspaper well you need to have some education, a great interest in affairs, some self-control, much tolerance, no tendency to dawdle, and no unconquerable desire to argue.

It is strange that the reading of the Bible aloud in an acceptable manner should present-apparently-almost insuperable difficulties. It is written in the finest English of the finest period.

It concerns subjects of universal and undying interest. It is endeared to every listener by tradition and recollection. But the evidence proves it hard to read well. Men specially interested in philosophy and religion, specially trained in Hebrew and Greek literature, specially anxious to bring the truths of Scripture home to their audience, read it for the most part in abominable fashion. We cannot insult them by supposing their weekly task an easy one. We cannot, on the other hand, deny that the Old and New Testaments offer great scope for fine reading. The task of the curate at the lectern is like the task of the executant before the piano. The one has great literature before him; the other great music. The audience waits for his interpretation. As a rule, with many and marked exceptions, the curate runs through his work in such a mechanical and uninterested manner as would empty a concert hall if imitated by his brother artist. He reads heroic passages as though they were dull, meditative passages of the highest inspiration as though they were parish notices, arguments as cut-anddried snippets of dogmatism, and shrewd proverbs as sacred poetry. How can he like to seem so indifferent to the Book whence his creed and his ritual have been digged? Of course, he would say that he was not indifferent, that reverence for the sacred text as a whole forbids any effort to emphasize the secular beauty of its parts. The argument is not perhaps quite so silly as it sounds. The mind of man demands an act of worship. All such acts tend in time to become mechanical and superstitious. The Reformers thought to do away with such acts. They dreaded their degeneracy into mere hocus-pocus. Search the Scriptures, they urged, and away with crosses and candles, prostrations and

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bells and beads. At first men put their whole hearts and souls into the reading of the Bible. Then they began to read it as a duty; then as a sort of ritual. They minced it up into texts, and administered it to themselves and others in convenient form. Such superstition was the inevitable result of the doctrine of verbal inspiration. The doctrine is dead, but it remains enshrined in a custom, a custom endeared by laziness, ecclesiastical vanity, and selfconscious shyness. Half the men who read the Bible in church simply do not try to read well. However, it is easy to be over-critical. Sacred droning may be very dull, but it remains true that great literature should not be read aloud like little literature. Some reverence for its greatness should appear, and a colloquial tone may well be very offensive to an audience bound to its seats. The way to avoid that, however, is surely not to determine to destroy the sense. It is true that the whole congregation have Bibles and can read for themselves, but that is no reason why the lessons should be 'taken as read' and run through without the slightest apparent interest in order to give the people the rest of sitting down for a while. Even this method cannot make the reading of the Gospel of none effect, but it makes nonsense of whole chapters of the Epistles. A good many young people not brought up to reverence the Bible as their fathers did, come home from church declaring those chapters are nonsense. It is a terrible pity, even from a literary point of view, that countenance should be given to such ignorance. Take, for instance, the early chapters of the First Epistle to the Romans. Carelessly read, verse by verse, with pauses between the artificial divisions and no regard to the eager style and breathless parenthesis of the Apostle, and we defy the listener