Another dispute turned on the interpretation of a clause in the Agreement of December, 1905, which reads: "China agrees that Japan has the right to improve the Antung-Mukden Railway so as to make it fit for the conveyance of commercial and industrial goods of all nations." Japan undertook, as a necessary "improvement" of the road, to reconstruct it, with a change of gauge to connect it with the standard gauge of the South Manchuria and Korean roads. China denied that the agreement gave a right to reconstruction. Several other questions arising between the two peoples have helped to raise hard feeling on both sides; but these have seemed to be at the front. At length on the 6th of August, 1909, Japan brought discussion of the Antung-Mukden Railway question to a summary ending, by a note to the Chinese Government which announced that "the Imperial Government is now compelled to take independent action, and to proceed to carry out the necessary work of reconstruction and improvement according to treaty rights." {98} Before taking this decisive step, the Japanese Government is said to have consulted Great Britain and other powers, and to have had approval of her action from London, if not from elsewhere. China yielded to the ultimatum, and this leading cause of quarrel between the great nations of the East was removed on the 4th of September by the signing, at Mukden, of a memorandum of agreement, reported in substance as follows: China agrees, first, not to construct the Hsin-min-tum-Fa-ku-men Railroad without consulting Japan; second, that half the capital required to extend the Kirin Railroad shall be borrowed in Japan; third, that Japan will be permitted to extend the Yinkow and improve and modernize the Antung-Mukden Railroads, to which China was bitterly opposed; fourth, that Japan may work the mines in the Fushun and Yentai districts, and have joint exploitation of the mines reached by the Antung and Manchurian Railroad lines. In the Chientao boundary dispute Japan agrees to recognize China’s sovereignty, while China agrees to open four trade marts in the district. In a letter to a London journal, a few days before this settlement of the Antung-Mukden Railway question, Lord Stanhope said: "The Chinese have surely deeper reasons for opposing this scheme than the mere fact of reconstruction. They well realize that this railway, crossing narrow valleys, can have no commercial future, but is virtually a strategic railway to strengthen the Japanese grip on Manchuria." CHINA: A. D. 1906. A Commission sent to America and Europe for the study of political and other institutions.