A few weeks later, after the forty days’ session of the new Provincial Assemblies had ended, this writer had changed his view. Writing on the 22d of December, he said: "A study of the reports of the proceedings so far available of the first session of the Provincial Assemblies supports the contention that the Throne has been justified in granting the subjects of the Empire a limited right of speech through their chosen representatives. The programmes of debate have been strictly in accordance with the Imperial edict, and the proceedings have been marked with dignity and decorum. The net result justifies the declaration made by a high authority, who has been given special opportunity of forming a judgment, that the ‘members have fulfilled their appointed task of working in harmony with the executive authorities in the interests of their respective provinces.’" CHINA: A. D. 1909-1910. Proposal of the United States for the neutralization of Manchurian Railways. Proposed Chinchow-Aigun Railway. Late in December, 1909, the United States Government submitted to that of China, and to the interested Powers, a proposition which contemplated the neutralization of the railways in Manchuria, now partly under Russian and partly under Japanese control, and which looked, also, to an international undertaking of the construction of a Chinchow-Aigun line, to tap the Russian Trans-Siberian road at Tsitshar. {103} In a published statement subsequently, the American Secretary of State, Mr. Knox, explained that his Government, during the recent railway loan negotiations, had pointed out to the interested Powers that the greatest danger to the policy of the open door in China and the development of her foreign trade arose from disagreements among the great Western nations, and had expressed the opinion that nothing would afford so impressive an object-lesson to China and the world as the spectacle of the four great capitalist nations—Great Britain, Germany, France, and the United States—standing together for equality of commercial opportunity. The American Government believed that one of the most effective steps to this end in order to secure for China the enjoyment of all political rights in Manchuria and to promote the normal development of the Eastern provinces was to take the Manchurian railroads out of Eastern politics and to place them under an economic and impartial administration by vesting in China herself the ownership of the railways. Such a policy would require the cooperation, not only of China, but of Russia and Japan, both of whom it would enable to shift their onerous responsibilities in connexion with those railways on to the shoulders of the combined Powers, including themselves, and would effect a complete commercial neutralization of Manchuria.