rather than of provinces; and that is a circumstance which, paradoxically, draws them nearer to America while not drawing America nearer to them. Talk of political reunion or permanent alliance between America and Great Britain would be vanity of vanities. But talk of moral coöperation between this country and all the members of the Commonwealth, for the promotion of justice and the maintenance of peace, is one of the most practical and hopeful of things. There was no exaggeration in the recent declaration of Mr. Stanley M. Bruce, the Prime Minister of Australia, to a New York audience, that "If the British Empire and America work together for the rehabilitation of Europe, and the promotion of peace, there is hope for mankind. If they do not, nothing mankind can devise can possibly succeed." Nor was there anything beyond plain common sense in the words of Mr. J. L. Garvin, the eminent English publicist, to the effect that "Whenever world peace itself is threatened, its maintenance would be assured by the combined weight of England and America thrown into the same scale. Periodical English-speaking conferences along the free lines of the recent Imperial Conference would keep up coöperation without entanglement."

Any formal pact would perhaps not be practicable, nor necessary. The Monroe Doctrine does not in terms apply to Canada, or the British West Indies, or Australia or New Zealand. Yet no rational man questions what would be the course of the United States of the United States Army and Navy-in case of danger of conquest of one of those countries by any other Power; or indeed what would be the course of those countries and of the whole British Commonwealth in the inconceivable case of danger of the conquest of America. As was said more than two generations ago, and as will be truly said for uncounted generations yet to come. "Blood is thicker than water."

THE CRUX OF CHINA

Complicated and involved as the Chinese problem is, one outstanding issue looms supreme. That is, the question of China's equal sovereignty among the independent Powers of

the world. More than two-thirds of a century ago, Lincoln expressed the wise belief that this nation could not permanently endure half slave and half free. So might it long ago have been declared that China could not, would not, should not, permanently endure to be half sovereign and half subject. Either it must be entirely sovereign, with full control over all its own territory, its courts, its tariffs, and what not; or it must sink to the level of a dependent and subject State. The determination of that question is paramount among the issues in Eastern Asia today, just as much as was that of slavery or freedom in the America of Lincoln's time. All other issues, and all other settlements that may be made, are subordinate to it.

The matter of control of foreign concessions of territory is one with which we are not concerned. It has not been the American practice to seek such concessions. In that of alien control of Chinese tariffs we have been chiefly followers of and participators in European practice. Great Britain has been above all others responsible for the system which has long been imposed. But under the characteristic American principle of "most favored nation", established by Kearny with the "open door" eighty-five years ago, we have, of course, been identified with that system. In the matter of extraterritorial jurisdiction in the courts, however, America was the leader and has been properly regarded as its prime exponent. We may date the beginning of it away back to the Terranova case, more than a hundred years ago; while the detailed explication and confirmation of the principle occurred in 1844, when "Count” Caleb Cushing, under the most absurd credentials ever borne by an American or any other envoy, made one of the shrewdest and wisest of all our treaties. The principle of extraterritoriality had indeed been practiced to a limited extent for centuries, between European and some Mohammedan countries, but it remained for Cushing, in the name of America, first of all to insist upon its formal adoption as a world-wide rule between Christian and all non-Christian nations. And this, as he took pains to explain, was not because of any inferiority of the non-Christian States in independent sovereignty or in their right to their own codes of law and jurisprudence; but it was simply a practical recognition of the radical

and essential difference between two civilizations.

"Between them and us," said Cushing, "there is no community of ideas, no common law of nations, no interchange of good offices."

Conditions have greatly changed, and international relations have changed, since that time. It is still true that "East is East, and West is West"; but the twain are today much nearer meeting in many important respects than would have been deemed possible a generation ago. It is therefore a fair question whether this principle of extraterritoriality may not be abandoned in the case of China, even as we have already abandoned it in the case of other Asiatic Powers; and since America was the leader in establishing it, it would be eminently fitting for it to exercise such leadership in abrogating, modifying or otherwise dealing with it as the best judgment may dictate. That Great Britain signifies an inclination to coöperate in whatever policy our Government may pursue, is not the least auspicious feature of the case.

OUR RIGHTS IN NICARAGUA

The President's policy in Nicaragua was right. That we believe to be the judgment of the American people; with the exception perhaps of two small groups. There are those who hold that whatever is, is wrong; and that therefore insurgents against a constituted government are always of necessity right. There are also various replicas of Ko-Ko's—

idiot who praises in enthusiastic tone

All centuries but this and every country but his own,

who hold it iniquitous for the United States to enforce its rights or even fulfil its duties, while praising all other nations for doing so; repudiating the declaration in our primal charter that this country has "full power to do all acts and things which independent States may of right do". For us, we prefer Thomas Jefferson to Young-Man-Afraid-of-His-Horses.

The President's course was justifiable on three major grounds, any one of which would have been sufficient, alone. One was, the necessity of protecting the lives and property of American

citizens and the treaty rights of this country. The giving of such protection is a fundamental duty. The Government which fails to do it abdicates its authority and is unworthy longer to exist. Nor can we imagine a more hopeless piece of self-stultification than for a nation to invest millions of dollars in a canal route the utilization of which will be a necessity to its welfare in the not distant future, and then to abandon that property to the contingencies of revolution and potential conquest.

Another ground was the need of vindicating the Monroe Doctrine by affording to the citizens of other countries the protection which their Governments requested. When European Powers thus entrusted to us the performance of their own duty toward their own citizens, they showed in the clearest and most gratifying manner their respect for the validity of the Monroe Doctrine. Certainly it was incumbent upon us to show equal respect for it. We could not play the dog in the manger, by refusing either to grant such protection ourselves or to let the European Powers do it. There is no exaggeration in saying that the moral integrity of the Doctrine was at stake.

Finally, there was our moral obligation to regard a treaty, even one to which we were not ourselves technically but only morally a party, as something more than a "scrap of paper". Bear in mind that under our countenance and patronage, and with our encouragement, the Central American States entered into a solemn compact not to recognize any insurgent or revolutionary government unless the freely elected representatives of the people had constitutionally reorganized their country. If that did not place us under the strongest compulsion to stand by the constituted Government of Nicaragua, rather than to connive with insurgents for its overthrow, then words have lost their meaning and we had better strike the negatives out of the Decalogue, and reckon that two and two make five.

We are not willing for a moment to concede that the United States is not entitled to maintain its rights or is not bound to discharge its duties, in any place, at any time. We shall not admit that it is wrong for America to pursue a course which those who affect to condemn would piously praise if it were done by the League of Nations; or for America to do, on its own initiative, in

a neighboring State, that which its critics would applaud it for doing at the dictation of the League in Borrioboola Gha or the domains of the Akhoond of Swat.

JAPAN'S NEW ERA

America's bereavements, in the deaths of Presidents in office, have been so sorrowfully frequent that we can truly sympathize with Japan in her time of mourning. Yet we might also wish for a certain degree of emulation, here, of the Japanese spirit of reverence for the Chief of State, both living and dying. For the profound and protracted manifestations of woe at the passing of an Emperor are not mere worship of the individual, albeit he was traditionally reputed to be of Divine descent. Over and above all that, they are denotements of reverence for the lawful authority of which he was the supreme exponent; just as the divinity which hedged him and equally hedges his successor must be regarded as an adumbration not of the divine personality so much as of the divine sovereignty as the basis of all true law. We must, we repeat, wish that America might always have as much respect for a Chief of State chosen by the sovereign volition of the people, as the representative of law and government, as the Japanese have for their hereditary monarch in a like capacity.

It is the felicitous custom of Japan to regard and to name each imperial reign as a special era in her history, and with several of those eras it has been the lot of America to be intimately associated. There was one, marked with the masterful but beneficent doings of Matthew Calbraith Perry and Townsend Harris, remembered today by Japan with flattering gratitude. There was another, comparable in beneficence, the Era of Enlightenment, in which America also largely shared. Since then increasing contact has not at times been altogether free from artificial friction. That we must recognize, and for it we may not entirely absolve ourselves from blame. But there is assured ground for confidence that in the new era now begun there will be a confirmation and a most fruitful cultivation of