EAST IS WEST

"Protect American lives and property." This slogan covers a multitude of sins. A few days ago at Nankin one American life was lost, two Americans were wounded, and in return Admiral Hough bombarded the city, killing scores, at least, possibly hundreds, of Chinese. It is a wonder that any Americans at all are left alive in the interior of China. And the ultimate decision as to our policy in China seems to be with this same Admiral Hough.

Hundreds of American lives had been sacrificed to German submarine warfare before the United States entered the World War, and ten years later we can not be entirely sure that we acted rightly by so doing. Statesmanship is not entirely an affair to do with the life of every citizen who happens to get caught between two fires.

There are tremendous vistas of international complication in the present Eastern situation, and those on the scene, the Shanghai Chamber of Commerce, Admiral Hough, and the former consul at Nanking, who is rabidly anti-Cantonese, are not those to dictate our policy, for they are partisan individuals, and very possibly frightened ones.

Our interests in China are not so large as those of Great Britain, and they are to a larger extent philanthropie. Britain has been bullying China since 1842; for over three quarters of a century she has been grinding unequal rights of trade and property from the Chinese, and of late years forcing upon them the lucrative opium trade. An aggressive policy in China will merely reap for us a share of the odium of which Britain has sown the seeds. Our marines will be serving foreign interests as much as our own.

American missionaries have testified in spite of the decision of the State Department that the American fatalities are not the fault of the Cantonese authorities, but that on the contrary the Cantonese have made every effort to prevent them. After all, when machine guns are in readiness at a Chicago election, it is not surprising that men caught in the midst of a Chinese civil war should run unpreventable danger. And yet it looks now as though thousands of our troops will risk their lives to revenge the deaths of hot over a dozen of their countrymen.