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.

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 processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a virtual agreement regarding the administration of the new area had been reached—­an agreement which the Peking Government was prepared to put into force subject to one reasonable stipulation, that the local opposition to the new grant of territory which was very real, as Chinese feel passionately on the subject of the police-control of their land-acreage, was first overcome.  The whole essence or soul of the disputes lay therein:  that the lords of the soil, the people of China, and in this case more particularly the population of Tientsin, should accept the decision arrived at which was that a joint Franco-Chinese administration be established under a Chinese Chairman.