Page:Paul Samuel Reinsch - Secret Diplomacy, How Far Can It Be Eliminated? - 1922.djvu/138



tional. After having possessed herself of Tsing- tau, with a marked cold-shouldering of her Brit- ish 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 minis- ter 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 funda- mentally important, involving the national rights of a population of 350,000,000 people, through de- mands secretly forced upon a President, at a time when the national representative body did not function, that is one of the startling facts of mod- ern history. Strange as it may seem, the Japa- nese Foreign Office had apparently persuaded itself that secrecy could be maintained in a mat- ter 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 se- cretly disposed of, the facts of the case began to leak out, categorical denials were made by the Japanese Foreign Office and by various embas- sies. In this case, those who had the right to