the past three years having proved conclusively that the Chinese, in spite of their internal strife, are united to a man in their determination to prevent Japan from tightening her hold on Manchuria and instituting an open Protectorate, the Tokio Government has now drawn up a subtle scheme which it is believed will be effective. A Bill for the unification of administration in South Manchuria has passed the Japanese Cabinet Conference and will soon be formally promulgated. Under the provisions of this Bill, the Manchuria Railway Company will become the actual organ of Japanese administration in South Manchuria; the Japanese Consular Service will be subordinate to the administration of the Railway; and all the powers hitherto vested in the Consular Service, political, commercial, judicial and administrative, will be made part of the organization of the South Manchuria Railway. This is not all. From another Japanese source we learn that a law is about to take effect by which the administration of the South Manchuria Railway will be transferred directly to the control of the Government-General of Korea, thus making the Railway at once an apparently commercial but really political organization. In future the revenues of the South Manchuria Railway are to be paid direct to the Government-General of Korea; and the yearly appropriation for the upkeep and administration of the Railway is to be fixed at Yen 19,000,000. These arrangements, especially the amalgamation of the South Manchuria Railway, are to take effect from the 1st July, 1917, and are an attempt to do in the dark what Japan dares not yet attempt in the open.] No one wishes to deny to Japan her proper place in the world, in view of her marvellous industrial progress, but that place must be one which fits in with modern conceptions and is not one thing to the West and another to the East. Even the saying which was made so much of during the Russian war of 1904, that Korea in foreign hands was a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan--has been shown to be inherently false by the lessons of the present struggle, the Korean dagger- point being 120 sea miles from the Japanese coast. Such arguments clearly show that if the truce which was hastily patched up in 1905 is to give way to a permanent peace, that can be evolved only by locking on to the Far East the principles which are in process of being vindicated in Europe. In other words, precisely as Poland is to be given autonomy, so must Korea enjoy the same privileges, the whole Japanese theory of suzerainty on the Eastern Asiatic Continent being abandoned. To re-establish a proper balance of power in the Far East, the Korean nation, which has had a known historical existence of 1,500 years, must be reinstated in something resembling its old position; for Korea has always been the keystone of the Far Eastern arch, and it is the destruction of that arch more than anything else which has brought the collapse of China so perilously near.