Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/129

 to settle the problem—if supported. Elected six months ago his tenure of office has already brought improvement; and now that an actual peace conference has assembled in Shanghai to settle the dispute between North and South, hopes are reviving that the common sense of the Chinese race will win a lasting victory.

For fifteen months, however, desultory civil war between North and South has destroyed the fertile regions of Hunan, Szechuan, and Shensi provinces; and until the Allies, after much pressure, sent in Joint Notes on the necessity of instant internal peace, there were no signs that the two great divisions in the country could do more than continue their watchful drifting and thereby intensify the turmoil.

Now it must be plain from this account that something has been radically wrong with foreign diplomacy as well as with Chinese hearts for such a record to stand to the discredit of Peking. The type of diplomatic agent the several Allied governments have maintained in the Chinese capital during the Republican period has not been the type which the conditions emphatically call for. With the