Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/117

 sible until conditions throughout the land have been entirely revolutionized. But it is obvious that the complete throwing-open of China, with the universal right of trade and residence freely conceded, cannot be satisfactorily arranged if a favoured class is removed from police control—particularly such men as Japanese peddlers, who in hundreds and thousands roam the land retailing great and increasing quantities of morphia and opium in defiance of the law of the land.

Tariff and judicial autonomy go hand in hand; they are the necessary prerogatives of the sovereign State. Until this dual problem is settled in accordance with ordinary world-practice China will be an international cripple.

In this discussion we have travelled the whole road which it is possible to travel in one stage. To proceed further, would entangle issues in the minds of even those who are anxious to understand. Chinese currency; the Chinese debt; the Chinese civil and military administration; and the question of parliamentary government, are best considered separately as the Problem of Peking. They belong to a different category from the semi-foreign issues which we have just discussed, because they are of a different ancestry.