Mr. Lennox Simpson [Putnam Weale] is quoted as saying:  “The international bankers have a scheme for the international control of China.  Mr. Lamont, representing the consortium, offered a sixteen-million-dollar loan to China, which the Chinese Government refused to accept because Mr. Lamont insisted that the Hukuang bonds, German issue, which had been acquired by the Morgan Company, should be paid out of it.”  Mr. Lamont, on hearing this charge, made an emphatic denial, saying:  “Simpson’s statement is unqualifiedly false.  When this man Simpson talks about resisting the control of the international banks he is fantastic.  We don’t want control.  We are anxious that the Conference result in such a solution as will furnish full opportunity to China to fulfil her own destiny.”

Sagacious people will be inclined to conclude that so much anger must be due to being touched on the raw, and that Mr. Lamont, if he had had nothing to conceal, would not have spoken of a distinguished writer and one of China’s best friends as “this man Simpson.”

I do not pretend that the evidence against the consortium is conclusive, and I have not space here to set it all forth.  But to any European radical Mr. Lamont’s statement that the consortium does not want control reads like a contradiction in terms.  Those who wish to lend to a Government which is on the verge of bankruptcy, must aim at control, for, even if there were not the incident of the Chicago Bank, it would be impossible to believe that Messrs. Morgan are so purely philanthropic as not to care whether they get any interest on their money or not, although emissaries of the consortium in China have spoken as though this were the case, thereby greatly increasing the suspicions of the Chinese.

In the New Republic for November 30, 1921, there is an article by Mr. Brailsford entitled “A New Technique of Peace,” which I fear is prophetic even if not wholly applicable at the moment when it was written.  I expect to see, if the Americans are successful in the Far East, China compelled to be orderly so as to afford a field for foreign commerce and industry; a government which the West will consider good substituted for the present go-as-you-please anarchy; a gradually increasing flow of wealth from China to the investing countries, the chief of which is America; the development of a sweated proletariat; the spread of Christianity; the substitution of the American civilization for the Chinese; the destruction of traditional beauty, except for such objets d’art as millionaires may think it worth while to buy; the gradual awakening of China to her exploitation by the foreigner; and one day, fifty or a hundred years hence, the massacre of every white man throughout the Celestial Empire at a signal from some vast secret society.  All this is probably inevitable, human nature being what it is.  It will be done in order that rich men may grow richer, but we shall be told that it is done in order that China may have “good” government.  The definition of the word “good” is difficult, but the definition of “good government” is as easy as A.B.C.:  it is government that yields fat dividends to capitalists.