If Manchuria is to be saved to China, it will be owing more to America’s insistence than to Britain, for Britain at present is tied up to Japan, and Britain in India has given a hostage to the East. Perhaps the best way to save Manchuria is to encourage Chinese emigration, and this plan is now working out, tens of thousands of Shangtungese leaving yearly for the three rich Manchurian provinces. The American suggestion that the Russian and Japanese railways in Manchuria should be made international is possibly not so good a plan as to sell those roads to China with money loaned for the purpose, and clean Manchuria of Russian and Japanese troops. There seems no permanent reason why China should not run Manchurian railways and mines as well and as profitably as she has run the North China Railway and the Kaiping mine of Pechili province. To illustrate how Chinese officialdom looks upon the general subject, I quote from Viceroy Liu Ming Chuan’s memorial, approved by Li Hung Chang, written in 1893: “Japan attempts now and again to be arrogant--like a mantis when it assumes an air of defiance--and to despise China, and gives us no small amount of trouble on the smallest pretext.” The advance party has its critics in Japan. The Tokio _Nichi_, the Osaka _Mainichi_, the Tokio _Jiji_ and the Tokio _Yorodzu_ take the nation to task for attempting to compete with America’s navy. They cry out against the expansionists’ slogan of “Japan’s supremacy on the Pacific”. Here is the _Yorodzu’s_ plaint against the heavy taxes involved: “Go to the hamlets and villages, and you find the sons of our soil wearing the sad and worn appearance of the ‘man with the hoe’. Ask the shopkeepers and merchants, and they tell you that they are at a loss to know how to make ends meet. So do small manufacturers and men of moderate salaries, and in fact all who come under the general term of the middle class. Why? What else but that their taxes are too heavy, and because the price of commodities has risen too high since the war? The war has increased the wealth only of the contractors, speculators, and a small group of millionaires, which accounts for the sudden rise of the prices of the necessaries of life. Thus the chasm between the poor and the rich is widening every day. What will become of the country if the government does not bend all its energies to the recuperation of our national strength, which has been overtaxed during and since the late war? The only course which the government should follow at this critical moment is to curtail all the unnecessary expenses of administration, most of all, those of the army and navy.” This succinctly covers what volumes could not cover better. The average Japanese income is twenty-three dollars gold a year, out of which one-fifth goes to taxes.