5.  A solatium of $500 (Five Hundred Dollars) to be given to the
    Japanese merchant Yoshimoto.

But though the incident was thus nominally closed, and amicable relations restored, the most important point—­the question of Japanese police-rights in Southern Manchuria and Eastern Inner Mongolia—­was left precisely where it had been before, the most vigorous Chinese protests not having induced Japan to abate in the slightest her pretensions.  During previous years a number of Japanese police-stations and police-boxes had been established in defiance of the local authorities in these regions, and although China in these negotiations recorded her strongest possible objection to their presence as being the principal cause of the continual friction between Chinese and Japanese, Japan refused to withdraw from her contention that they did not constitute any extension of the principle of extraterritoriality, and that indeed Japanese police, distributed at such points as the Japanese consular authorities considered necessary, must be permanently accepted.  Here then is a matter which will require careful consideration when the Powers meet to revise their Chinese Treaties as they must revise them after the world-war; for Japan in Manchuria is fundamentally in no different a position from England in the Yangtsze Valley and what applies to one must apply to the other.  The new Chinese police which are being distributed in ever greater numbers throughout China form an admirable force and are superior to Japanese police in the performance of nearly all their duties.  It is monstrous that Japan, as well as other Powers, should act in such a reprehensible manner when the Chinese administration is doing all it can to provide efficient guardians of the peace.

[Illustration:  The Famous or Infamous General Chang-Hsun, the leading Reactionary in China to-day, who still commands a force of 30,000 men astride of the Pukow Railway.]

[Illustration:  The Bas-relief in a Peking Temple, well illustrating Indo-Chinese influences.]

The second case was one in which French officialdom by a curious act of folly gravely alienated Chinese sympathies and gave a powerful weapon to the German propaganda in China at the end of 1916.  The Lao-hsi-kai dispute, which involved a bare 333 acres of land in Tientsin, has now taken its place beside the Chengchiatun affair, and has become a leading case in that great dossier of griefs which many Chinese declare make up the corpus of Euro-Chinese relations.  Here again the facts are absolutely simple and absolutely undisputed.  In 1902 the French consular authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped.  The Chinese authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various