A little thought would have shown him that they are in the first place ridiculously easy to imitate, the first one needing but a red blob on a white ground, and the second a little red ink, a clear white stripe, and a stripe of the ordinary blue ink, make a very fair tricolor. The first were also shown with the earnest desire to propitiate, the second because, not being able to make British or American ensigns, they thought that any protector was perhaps better than none. Now so much has been said and written on the great evils of looting, and especially on the looting of Tientsin, that a summing up of the case by one who was to a certain extent “in the know” can hardly be inappropriate or uninteresting. To begin with, the evidence of many of those who have written articles to the papers in denunciation of the authorities, or of the allied troops, is worth but little, as it is more than probable that, by infringing some of the rules, they lost what they themselves had looted, and their bitter feelings may be accounted for by the fact that although it is occasionally “better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all,” it is certainly not better to have looted and forfeited, than never to have looted at all. Thus a proportion must be deducted from the ranks of “conscientious objectors” whose argument is that the transferment of some one else’s property to oneself is never permissible, except it take the form of an exchange, a sale, or a gift; also that the recognised law in civilised warfare is that looters will be shot. On the other side of the argument are to be found of course all the participators, and a multitude of people who envy the latter their good fortune, but whose envy does not go far enough to cause them to act protector of the down-trodden, through the medium of the press. These very rightly say, that in the first place the Tientsin looting was not an incident in civilised warfare at all; “devilishly cruel” has been already applied to the Chinese in this book, but the superlative has not yet been coined which would adequately describe the treatment of women and the wounded who fell into their hands. Then again the power to “save face” is so highly thought of in China, that had Tientsin not been looted, and had it not been decided to alter the face of the city in other ways as well, it is probable that one of the most valuable lessons of the whole war would have remained untaught. Another excellent excuse was the fact that quite a third of the city was in flames, in which case, had no looting taken place, thousands of valuables would now be no more, whereas they have gone to gladden the hearts of the womenfolk, and to brighten the rooms of every nation of any importance from Japan westward to America.