The issue is a vital one.  China by her recent acts has given a categorical and unmistakable reply to all the insidious attempts to place her outside and beyond the operation of international law and all those sanctions which make life worth living; and because of the formal birth of a Foreign Policy it can be definitely expected that this nation, despite its internal troubles and struggles, will never rest content until she has created a new nexus of world-relationships which shall affirm and apply every one of the principles experience elsewhere has proved are the absolute essentials to peace and happiness.  China is already many decades ahead of Japan in her theory of government, no matter what the practice may be, the marvellous revolution of 1911 having given back to this ancient race its old position of leader in ideas on the shores of the Yellow Sea.  The whole dream Japan has cherished, and has sought to give form to during the war, is in the last analysis antiquated and forlorn and must ultimately dissolve into thin air; for it is monstrous to suppose, in an age when European men have sacrificed everything to free themselves from the last vestiges of feudalism, that in the Far East the cult of Sparta should remain a hallowed and respected doctrine.  Japan’s policy in the Far East during the period of the war has been uniformly mischievous and is largely responsible for the fierce hatreds which burst out in 1917 over the war issue; and China will be forced to raise at the earliest possible moment the whole question of the validity of the undertakings extorted from her in 1915 under the threat of an ultimatum.  Although the precise nature of Anglo-Japanese diplomacy during the vital eleven days from the 4th to the 15th August, 1914, [i. e. from the British declaration of war on Germany to the Japanese ultimatum regarding Kiaochow] remains a sealed book, China suspects that Japan from the very beginning of the present war world-struggle has taken advantage of England’s vast commitments and acted ultra vires.  China hopes and believes that Britain will never again renew the Japanese alliance, which expires in 1921, in its present form, particularly now that an Anglo-American agreement has been made possible.  China knows that in spite of all coquetting with both the extreme radical and military parties which is going on daily in Peking and the provinces, the secret object of Japanese diplomacy is either the restoration of the Manchu dynasty, or the enthronement of some pliant usurper, a puppet-Emperor being what is needed to repeat in China the history of Korea.  Japan would be willing to go to any lengths to secure the attainment of this reactionary object.  Faithful to her “divine mission,” she is ceaselessly stirring up trouble and hoping that time may still be left her to consolidate her position on the Asiatic mainland, one of her latest methods being to busy herself at distant points in the Pacific so that Western men for the sake of peace may be ultimately willing to abandon the shores of the Yellow Seas to her unchallenged mastery.