Peking Government is held by all as disreputable and possibly corrupt. It is tainted in the popular belief by the sinister hand of Japan. Conditions would be chaotic, with great armies in the field and no authority anywhere, were it not for the fact that the Chinese have, independently of all governments, at all times, a way of settling disputes among themselves and preserving their social organization. Canton, China, December 11, 1921.

I

ARTICLE VIII

Poppy Peddlers for Pay;
How Public Opinion is Confused on
Japanese Problems

HAVE have been reading the magazine press on shipboard and I find that American publications are in circulation all over the world, and many of our better class periodicals give the casual reader wrong impressions of international questions, where sides are taken and conflict is waged. One writer of no celebrity recently printed a footnote to his article on Japanese activities, claiming that his authority for most of what he wrote was the former American Ambassador to Japan. He ridiculed the Californians, who are poignantly suffering from the invasion of their soil by non-assimilables, and stated that when they cried out in pain they disturbed diplomatic relations; that they showed anger and did not in distress behave stoically. The American who suffers an injury should speak out. The Californian is the exposed warder by the Golden Gate. It is his patriotic duty to warn his countrymen. Who fails to pro

test wrong

is craven or content-the Californian is neither. It will be found that the average propagandist is either hypnotized or hired.

"Such smiling rogues as these smooth every passion
Renege, affirm, and turn their halcyon beaks

With every gale and vary of their masters."

I have a very distinct impression of our former ambassador as an honorable but misguided man. First, soon after his arrival in Tokio, I was advised by a friend there, who had personal knowledge, that he had been promptly put under the spell of the cherry blossom and chrysanthemum. He could see no good in America's contention, and conceived a new policy of his own. Then I met him in July, 1920, in the anteroom of the Democratic National Convention in San Francisco, and there discovered that he was absent from his post to silence platform declarations on the Japanese question. I appealed to the Platform Committee, and Messrs. Bainbridge Colby, W. Bourke Cockran and Wm. J. Bryan gave me satisfactory assurances, and then they made for the Democracy a stronger plank than the one already in the Republican declaration of principles and purposes.

Then again, I found in January, 1921, that the ambassador, still absent from his post, was negotiating a treaty with the Japanese Ambassador Shidahara in Washington, and, during the absence of Secretary of State Colby, in South America, seemed to have his way. The return of the Secretary was announced, and the California Senators and Representatives, much alarmed, asked to see the result of the joint Ambassadorial labors. It provided in effect

that California should be turned over to the resident Japanese by giving them property rights and other privileges. We appealed to Secretary Colby, who assured us that it had died aborning, and would never see the light of day.

This gentleman's inaptitude may also be better understood by the character of a Japanese whom he commended to me by a personal letter when I was in Washington a few years ago. This man called by appointment, brought with him a vicious-looking bodyguard (I judged from his appearance and manner), and then proposed as a solution of the Japanese question in California that the Japanese farmers be segregated in the river deltas and be given the Imperial Valley in the southern part of the State, where, he said, white men could not work on account of the heat. It happens that white men have developed it and made it, perhaps, the most productive area in the world. It is hot, but the Japanese say that they do not covet the Philippine Islands, whose heat is no more enervating. Men get accustomed to heat where the returns are abundant.

The ambassador never did return to his post. I learn now that he was discredited in all his undertakings. After having been sent to Siberia by the department, his recommendations were disapproved. His well-meaning friendship for Japan had apparently over stepped the diplomatic lines, and reached a degree of intensity that caused a cessation of confidence on the part of Miss Columbia and her Uncle Sam. Now this gentleman is inspiring magazine articles! I claim that he has no valid credentials to the court of public opinion.

It has been frequently observed in American political life that public opinion is the final court of appeals. Indeed,