being limited to only 5,000,000 rubles, while the latter, which was officially guaranteed, could be indefinitely expanded according to necessity.[172] It in fact had already before the present war swollen to the enormous sum of over 270,000,000 rubles.[173] In the second place, the operation of the railroad was placed upon the uniform basis of the Siberian system, and under the management of a board whose nominal president was a Chinese,[174] but whose vice-president, who was to assume the actual direction, was under the supervision of the Minister of Finance.[175] Finally, but not the least in importance, was the provision regarding the protection of the railway and its employees and the policing of the lands assigned to the road and its appurtenances. The former duty was to be performed by the Chinese Government, but the latter “was confined to police agents appointed by the Company. The Company shall for this purpose draw up and establish police regulations.”[176] In these police agents, ostensibly to be employed by the Company, one may discern the origin of the famous “railway guards,” later called the “frontier guards,” whose existence has become an important problem since 1902 in connection with the Russian evacuation of Manchuria. It should also be noted that this provision concerning the police agents does not appear in the corresponding Article in the text of the Agreement between China and the Bank, upon which the Statutes were based, so that one is at a loss to know what was the conventional ground for this Russian law, unless, indeed, it was the so-called Cassini Convention, which was alleged to have provided for the organization of Russian infantry and cavalry battalions in order to protect Russian interests in the more remote parts of Manchuria. It was agreed that the line should, after eighty years, come under the possession of the Chinese Government, which might also buy up the road and its appurtenances after thirty-six years.[177] It is interesting to see that it also provided that during the eighty years of Russian management, all commodities carried between China and Russia by the railway should pay in China duties one third less than the ordinary import and export duties in that Empire,[178] a provision hardly reconcilable with the open door principle, and explicitly contrary to the principles proposed by the United States to the Powers two years later.[179] The Eastern Chinese Railway Company was organized in February, 1897, and the first sod of the Manchuria Railway was cut with great ceremony on the eastern frontier of the Kirin Province on August 28, 1897.