Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/108

 because Russia in Manchuria was then such an international peril, America and Japan followed suit—making the same reservations whilst they introduced the same clauses, thus securing that one more pious hope was enshrined in the dust of Chinese archives, to be left there indefinitely like an Egyptian mummy. Since then nothing has been done—nothing for sixteen years; and in the routine decennial tariff revision which has just taken place in Shanghai, Japan, until the Armistice in Europe of the 11th November, placed every obstacle in the way of China, even acquiring an effective five per cent. levy which has been her treaty right for sixty years.

As in railways so in Customs matters, it is once again Japan that renders so difficult the task of real reform, not only in the matter of treaties but in the matter of the daily routine. At all ports where Japanese commissioners of Maritime Customs hold office, it is undeniable that centres of the contraband trade have been established, opium and its derivatives being so openly smuggled that the annual net import of Japanese morphia into China (although this trade is forbidden by International Convention) is now said to be twenty tons a year—an amount sufficient to poison a whole nation.