For once Chinese realize that parliamentary government is not merely an experimental thing but the last chance the country is to be given to govern itself, they will rally to the call and prove that much of the trouble and turmoil of past years has been due to the misunderstanding of the internal problem by Western minds, which has incited the population to intrigue against one another and remain disunited. And if we insist that there is urgent need for a settlement of these matters in the terms we have indicated, it is because we know very prcisely what Japanese thought on this subject really is. What is that thought--whither does it lead? It may be broadly said that Japanese activities throughout the Far East are based on a thorough and adequate appreciation of the fact that apart from the winning of the hegemony of China, there is the far more difficult and knotty problem of overshadowing and ultimately dislodging the huge network of foreign interests-- particularly British interests--which seventy-five years of Treaty intercourse have entwined about the country. These interests, growing out of the seed planted in the early Canton Factory days, had their origin in the termination by the act of the British Government of the trading monopoly enjoyed until the thirties of last century by the East India Company. Left without proper definition until the Treaty of Nanking in 1842 had formally won the principle of trading-rights at five open ports, and thus established a first basis of agreement between England and China (to which all the trading powers hastened to subscribe), these interests expanded in a half-hearted way until 1860, when in order to terminate friction, the principle of extraterritoriality was boldly borrowed from the Turkish Capitulations, and made the rock on which the entire fabric of international dealings in China was based. These treaties, with their always-recurring "most-favoured nation" clause, and their implication of equal treatment for all Powers alike, constitute the Public Law of the Far East, just as much as the Treaties between the Nations constitute the Public Law of Europe; and any attempt to destroy, cripple, or limit their scope and function has been very generally deemed an assault on all the High Contracting Parties alike. By a thoroughly Machiavellian piece of reasoning, those who have been responsible for the framing of recent Japanese policy, have held it essential to their plan to keep the world chained to the principle of extraterritoriality and Chinese Tariff and economic subjection because these things, imposing as they necessarily do restrictions and limitations in many fields, leave it free to the Japanese to place themselves outside and beyond these restrictions and limitations; and, by means of special zones and secret encroachments, to extend their influence so widely that ultimately foreign treaty-ports and foreign interests may be left isolated