China is suspicious regarding foreign loans, and many of the new China party which precipitated the October, 1911, revolution are opposed to even railway loans. Objection has been made to one American loan that it included, besides proper interest, a bonus of millions to take up bonds of a previous American syndicate which never performed railway work in China for those bonds; that is, they were organization paper, not property paper. Objection is also made that our loans name as security the perpetuation of the odious likin system which disjoints the trade, politics and transportation of the provinces. The Chinese of the south have constructed many short railroads, which are run at a profit without foreign loans, and it is this system which the “states’ rights” people wish to spread. Political and economical education in the provincial assemblies will in time teach them the wisdom of the nationalization of trunk railways at least. There is the same conflict in China between the states, or provinces, and the federal power, as there is in other countries. In the matter of foreign loans, the provincial papers complain that the central government has sold the nation by paying bonuses and heavy interest. The trouble with provincial loans for railways will be the mixed security offered, one province providing for the continuation of the objectionable likin, and another province withstanding it. It is a perfect curse along the magnificent Shanghai-Nanking railway built by British contractors. The strong desire of the provinces, in the first ebullition of patriotism, is to build and operate their railways without foreign aid or federal intervention. In times of political trouble, the Chinese place vast sums in the trust, not only of foreign banks at Tientsin, Shanghai and Hongkong, but valuables and money are placed implicitly in the care of missionaries, whose fiduciary honesty is esteemed by the Chinese, who, if they do not understand the text, understand the living example! The missionary is not only a tower of “doctrine”, to use the Chinese idiom; he is a tower of finance also. It is a remarkable thing that when the white man’s honesty at home in certain scandals exposed by government prosecutions, is rocking like a wooden steeple in the grasp of a tornado, the white man’s honesty in China is standing steadfast as a rock, and unmoved in the typhoon of local and international distress, and political, religious and educational change. It seems that it is a wholesome time to send some of our monopolists to China, and bring some of our missionaries back to reform things at home!