Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/164

 agents whom she seduced to her point of view, and used as her instruments. No longer using the Chinese Foreign Office as her channel of communication, she boldly commenced making secret agreements with the Northern military party, and by means of her agents in the Ministries of Communications and Finance has been able under cover of the World War to do untold harm. Adopting the simple principle that the 'postponed' Group V of the Twenty-one Demands was her principal business wito the Republic, she has for three years sought to do piecemeal and secretly what she failed to do openly, i.e. to get into her hands, or into the hands of her agents, control of Chinese arms and munitions, control of strategic areas, control of important railways and control of industrial monopolies. How many secret agreements in all she has made no one accurately knows; but the Arms Agreements made during the past three years and the Sino-Japanese Military Agreement of 1918—nominally to deal with the Bolshevist threat on China's Manchurian frontiers but really to bind Peking to her chariot-wheel—are notorious instruments, whilst the network of financial undertakings, made mainly