Despite Japan’s and Russia’s rejection of America’s suggestion in 1910, there will remain only one course eventually to be taken as the result of Secretary Hay’s announcement in 1899 of the “open door” policy for all time in China and Manchuria, and that is for a revivified China to secure an international five-nation loan, or preferably a four-nation loan, to take over from Russia and Japan all the railways held by those two nations in Manchuria, and clean those three provinces of Japanese and Russian troops and Achranie Straja (railway guards), Manchuria thereafter acting as a buffer Chinese state between those really irreconcilable contestants, who under present conditions promise to throw the whole world into warlike turmoil every decade. The Japanese and Russians, by blocking, in 1910, the American railway concession from Chin Wang Tao to Aigun (which America did not intend to occupy with troops) really confessed that they considered, since it so suited them, that the secret agreement which Russia forced from China in 1899 was of superior power to the Japan-Russia Treaty made at Portsmouth, which avowed the “open door” policy. Britain, under pressure from Russia, agreed in 1899 that the former was not to interfere north of Peking, and the latter agreed not to interfere in the Yangtze valley (as though she ever could!). In that same year John Hay secured the assent of the nations, including Russia and Britain, to the policies for all time of the “non-partition of China” and the “open door”, which policies were confirmed by the Portsmouth Treaty, and therefore Japan and Russia, in blocking the Chin Wang to Aigun railway, Chin Wang to Kailar, or any other northern or Manchurian railway, were acting _ultra vires_, and negotiations in the interest of China, and the development of America’s trade, might well come up again. Certainly the South Manchurian railway has all the traffic it can handle, and it can no more serve great Manchuria and Eastern Mongolia than could a railway confined to Florida serve the eastern and central states as far north as Philadelphia.