with the best of the Occident that before the war she made to ally herself with the worst. What we have to remember is that Japan is, like all nations to a degree, a dual nation; there are two Japans—the one clinging to the old militaristic, autocratic notion of government, the other struggling to understand and realize the meaning of a united, coöperating world in which each man and each nation shall have a chance at peaceful, prosperous living. CHAPTER X CHINA AT THE CONFERENCE The most difficult problems with which the Conference for the Limitation of Armament had to deal were those centering about China. We wanted China to have her own. We wanted her to be let alone, to run her government to suit herself, to be free from exploitation, duress, intrigues. As a people we wanted this very much. We came as near being sentimental over China as one nation can be over another. We like the Chinese as a people. We would like to see them as sanitary as they are friendly, as honest as they are industrious, as free from their own vices as they are from most of ours. We are more sentimental about them because our own dealings with them have been on the whole so fair. We are proud of the position we have taken as a nation toward China and we would like to keep up our record, justifying the Chinese conviction that we are a disinterested and reliable friend. Our dealings have been decent—the policy of the Open Door, the return of a large share of the Boxer indemnity, the protest that we made in 1915 when we learned of the outrageous twenty-one demands that Japan had forced from the Peking government: we have prided ourselves on these things, and when at Paris in 1919 President Wilson consented to the transfer of the German rights in Shantung to Japan, there was a chorus of disapproval, and we came to this Conference resolved that Shantung should be restored to China; moreover, that a long list of interferences with her freedom of administration should cease. The disappointment came in finding that what China wanted, and we wanted her to have, was much more difficult to realize than we had appreciated, and that in a majority of cases, probably the worst thing that could happen would be to have her full requests granted.