Count Czernin has given in his book, _In the World War_, an unimpassioned and coldly-balanced view of the diplomacy of the time. He does not relate the details of the secret negotiations of 1917, but he evidently did not approve of the manner in which they were carried out because their effect was to suggest to the Entente a willingness of Austria-Hungary to separate from her allies, without strengthening her position in any way. In a letter written to Count Tisza in the summer of 1917, Czernin said: “It is possible to turn and steer the Entente course if thought feasible; but then courage would be needed to make the turn fully. Nothing is more stupid than trifling with treachery and not carrying it out; we should lose all ground in Berlin and gain nothing either in London or Paris.” The policy pursued by Japan throughout the war made use of all the devices of secret diplomacy for the attainment of ends narrowly national. After having possessed herself of Tsing-tau, with a marked cold-shouldering of her British allies, Japan set about an attempt to arrange things in China so that no effective resistance might be offered there to Japan’s expansionist desires. In January, 1915, the Japanese minister in an interview with the President of China, after enjoining the strictest secrecy on the pain of most disagreeable consequences, proposed the famous twenty-one demands. That it should have been attempted to dispose of matters so fundamentally important, involving the national rights of a population of 350,000,000 people, through demands secretly forced upon a President, at a time when the national representative body did not function,--that is one of the startling facts of modern history. Strange as it may seem, the Japanese Foreign Office had apparently persuaded itself that secrecy could be maintained in a matter of such transcendent importance. For when contrary to that expectation and in accordance with nature and with the salutary fact that, after all, such tremendous issues can not be thus secretly disposed of, the facts of the case began to leak out, categorical denials were made by the Japanese Foreign Office and by various embassies. In this case, those who had the right to object to the disposal of important interests in which they themselves had a share, were not mere neutrals or outsiders but the allies of Japan, engaged in a life and death struggle at the time. As the twenty-one demands aimed at the establishment of a predominant position in China through control of finance and armament, every other nation there interested would have been adversely affected by the proposed arrangement. The Chinese, though isolated, would not immediately yield to the threatening attitude of their neighbor and the negotiations were strung out over months. Though they were assiduously kept secret, the nature of the transaction in general and in detail became quite well known outside, so that the results could not be kept hidden; yet