the present conflict will have truly been a War of Liberation for the East as well as for the West.  For although Japan has been engaged for some years in declaring to all Asiatics under her breath that she holds out the hand of a brother to them, and dreams of the days when the age of European conquests will be nothing but a distant memory, her actions have consistently belied her words and shown that she has not progressed in political thought much beyond the crude conceptions of the Eighteenth Century.  Thus Korea, which fell under her sway because the nominal independence of the country had long made it the centre of disastrous international intrigues, is governed to-day as a conquered province by a military viceroy without a trace of autonomy remaining and without any promise that such a regime is only temporary.  Although nothing in the undertakings made with the Powers has ever admitted that a nation which boasts of an ancient line of kings, and which gave Japan much of her own civilization, should be stamped under foot in such manner, the course which politics have taken in Korea has been disastrous in the extreme ever since Lord Lansdowne in 1905, as British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, pointed out in a careful dispatch to the Russian Government that Korea was a region which fell naturally under the sway of Japan.  Not only has a tragic fate overcome the sixteen million inhabitants of that country, but there has been a covert extension of the principles applied to them to the people of China.  Now if as we say European concepts are to have universal meaning, and if Japan desires European treatment, it is time that it is realized that the policy followed in Korea, combined with the attempt to extend that treatment to soil where China rightly claims undisputed sovereignty, forms an insuperable barrier to Japan being admitted to the inner council of the nations. [Footnote:  A very remarkable confirmation of these statements is afforded in the latest Japanese decision regarding Manchuria which will be immediately enforced.  The experience of the past three years having proved conclusively that the Chinese, in spite of their internal strife, are united to a man in their determination to prevent Japan from tightening her hold on Manchuria and instituting an open Protectorate, the Tokio Government has now drawn up a subtle scheme which it is believed will be effective.  A Bill for the unification of administration in South Manchuria has passed the Japanese Cabinet Conference and will soon be formally promulgated.  Under the provisions of this Bill, the Manchuria Railway Company will become the actual organ of Japanese administration in South Manchuria; the Japanese Consular Service will be subordinate to the administration of the Railway; and all the powers hitherto vested in the Consular Service, political, commercial, judicial and administrative, will be made part of the organization of the South Manchuria Railway.  This is not all.  From another Japanese source