Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/119



writer has established, it is to be hoped clearly, the outline of his argument regarding the solution of the imbroglio in the Far East. Taking as his starting-point the practical results flowing from the Chinese collapse in the Korean war of 1894, and the present state of China's international commitments, he found that an indispensable element was wholesale treaty reform—not only as a matter of right but as a matter of expediency. He showed how it must be worked out, what were the real difficulties, and who really stood to lose by such radical adjustments. And yet it must be confessed that even if the relations between China and the West are so fundamentally recast as to revolutionize the old conditions, there will still remain the far more thorny matter of erecting in Peking a really competent government, able and willing to govern by constitutional means, and reasonably stable.

The problem of Peking is so peculiar that no