Will Japan respect the pledges she has made and live up to the spirit of her promises? If she does, the Washington Conference will prove to be a great success. If, on the contrary, Japan does not intend to live up to her pledges or intends to fulfill them only in part, her position in Asia has been greatly strengthened. She is more firmly intrenched in Manchuria than ever. She holds the Maritime Province of Siberia under a promise to get out, which she has repeatedly made and repeatedly broken, as was plainly stated by Secretary Hughes before the full Committee on Far Eastern Affairs, and repeated at a plenary session of the Conference. His statement was one of the most remarkable, by reason of its directness and unvarnished truth, in the history of American diplomacy. After reviewing the correspondence between the two governments and the reiterated assurances of Japan of her intention to withdraw from Siberia, assurances which so far had not been carried out, Mr. Hughes expressed his gratification at the renewal of these assurances before the Conference in plenary session. Unless Japan is utterly devoid of moral shame, she will have to make good her word this time. When the treaties drafted by the Conference were submitted by the President to the Senate, they encountered serious opposition, but were finally ratified. The Republican leaders, particularly Senator Lodge, were twitted with charges of inconsistency in advocating certain features of these treaties when they had violently opposed the League of Nations. The Four-Power Treaty is much more of an entangling alliance than the Covenant of the League, and the Naval Treaty deprives Congress for a period of fifteen years of its constitutional right to determine the size of the navy and to provide for the defense of Guam and the Philippines. In fact, there were very few objections raised to the League of Nations which could not with equal force be applied to the Four-Power and Naval Treaties. The Four-Power Treaty was the main object of attack, and Senators Lodge and Underwood were greatly embarrassed in attempting to explain its meaning. Its "baffling brevity" demanded explanations, but no satisfactory explanations were forthcoming. They talked in general terms about the tremendous importance of the treaty, but they dared not state the real fact that the treaty was drafted by Mr. Balfour and Baron Kato as the most convenient method of terminating the Anglo-Japanese Alliance without making it appear to the Japanese public that their government had surrendered the alliance without due compensation. According to an Associated Press Dispatch from Tokio, January 31, 1922, Baron Uchida, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, replying to interpolations in the House of Peers, said: "The Four-Power Treaty was not intended to abrogate the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but rather to widen and extend it." The real _quid pro quo_ for the termination of the Anglo-Japanese