rests mainly on their grip on the railways. And so, with their splendid outlet to the sea always in view, the Germans have intrigued and maneuvered their way through a dozen international agreements into an effective control over some of the crucial railway connections of eastern Asia. They hold, as I have said, the major half of the line from Tientsin to Nanking, the greatest railway project yet completed in eastern China, and by connecting Tsingtao with this line have given it direct access to Siberia and Europe. By the terms of the Four Power Loan they secured the. construction of the section of the great Hanhow-Szechuen trunk line between Hankow and Ichang, the most vital part of the railway which is to open to the world the largest and richest province in China. And only last year the Deutsch-Asiatische Bank signed up with the Chinese Government for the construction of three new lines which, if they are allowed to be completed, will make every port in China, as a railway terminus, secondary to Tsingtao and rivet upon eastern China a tight and dominant German system. One of these new railways opens the way from Tsingtao to Hankow, the Chicago of China on the Yangtse, by an extension of the Tsingtao connection with the Tientsin Railway at Tsinanfu due west to Shuntehfu on the main line of the Peking-Hankow railway. Another project connects Tsingtao diagonally to the southwest with Yihsien, where the Grand Canal crosses the extreme southern division of the German section of the Tientsin-Nanking Railway, to control south to Nanking, being taken up by the English from the Kiangsu Province border a few miles farther on. The third line continues this connection with Tsingtao and carries it due west about thirty miles to a town called Tsiningchau. Here for the moment it ends, apparently in the middle of nowhere.

Not

so to the Germans, however, for they have the first option with the Chinese of continuing it in the same direction to Kaifeng, the ancient capital of China on the Hoangho River.

And here the magnitude of their design begins to be seen, for Kaifeng is the eastern terminus of the vast Franco-Russo-Belgian system, already formidably under way, which will one day pierce the heart of the Asiatic continent from the trans-Caspian outposts of Russia three thousand miles across the vast unknown deserts of Chinese Turkestan, and will sweep thence through the center of China

to the sea. Parts of it are already built and in operation, notably the one-hundred andforty-mile road from Horanfu to Kaifeng; another three-hundred-mile stretch westward to Sianfu is rapidly being completed, and loans to the extent of $50,000,000 were signed in 1912 to bind the bargain for the rest. This vast scheme already has two thousand miles of trunk connections guaranteed and signed for by the Chinese Government, including a fourteen-hundred-mile connection southward to Chungking, Yunnanfu, and French Indo-China, and a six-hundred-mile connection northward with the PekingKalgan line, which sooner or later must be linked up with the Trans-Siberian. Northward, westward, southward, it is all-powerful, far overshadowing even the British railway schemes ramifying from the Yangtse Valley and from Canton. Only eastward toward the sea is its destination uncertain. And well it may be, for the Germans hold in Tsingtao and the railways that serve Tsingtao the natural terminus which gives this vast system the only outlet on the coast fitting to its continental magnitude. This is the reason for that little railway pointing toward Kaifeng; this is the reason for the elaborate connec tions, capitalized at over $75,000,000, which concentrate on Tsingtao. Not a mere Port Arthur is at stake, but a gateway to commercial empire.

It is a splendid and far-seeing conception, certainly worthy of more honorable methods than have been used to attain it, but no more ruthless, at any rate, than the visions of Cecil Rhodes and the continental schemes of our own lords of higher industry and finance. And already, up to the very edge of the present war, one could see these great plans working out in developments nearer and nearer to their practical realization. One instance is sufficient to make the point: the decision of a directors' meeting of the Shantung Eisenbahn Gesellschaft, the general name for the German exploiting company, to spend $12,500,000 in the erection of a vast steel and iron plant at Tsangkau, just outside of Tsingtao. At the same meeting, on June 5 of this year, it was decided to include an arsenal in the new works, besides the most modern equipment in the way of a rolling mill for bar iron, a coke oven, two great furnaces, Martin works, etc., etc. With this establishment as a nucleus, two other arsenals were to be built at the special request of the Chinese Government in the provinces of

1914

Chihli and Shansi, equipped by the company and managed for ten years by Germans.

With the arrival of the Japanese fleet before Kiaochau Harbor this project vanishes again into the realm of visions; but it remains an authentic vision, just the same, of what must some day or other be a dominant factor in the future greatness of Tsingtao. The hinterland of Shantung, moreover, is as rich in iron ore and in coal, the raw materials of this industrial destiny, as any of the great unexploited provinces of China. The two coalfields at Weihsien and Poshan, so carefully marked off in 1898, have realized every expectation in the quantity and quality of their output, averaging to-day an annual production of just under half a million tons in the midst of vast valleys of coal lands yet untouched.

Such, then, is the position of Tsingtao as a key to empire in eastern Asia. The JapThe Japanese have promised to restore it, with all its immense strategic and commercial value, to the unimpaired authority of the Chinese Government. I have said at the beginning that Japan sees its value, and I believe she does.

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But that is no reason why Americans should begin to doubt her good faith until China shall have doubted it herself, and on the basis of the details of a situation in which she is just as likely as we are to cherish skepticism where skepticism seems just. Japan's opportunity to dispel this skepticism about her real intentions, not only among the Chinese, but among her allies in Europe, and among the people of this country, always as ready as anybody on earth to be her friends, is a very exceptional opportunity indeed. Tsingtao, with its immense economic importance to China, should belong to China. Any other settlement will not be merely unjust but will constitute a persistent and aggravating menace to peace in the Far East. The empire to which Tsingtao holds the key is not an empire which can be unlocked by aggression and militarism. and militarism. That has been Germany's only miscalculation, but it has been a costly one. In the name of peace and fair play among the nations, let us hope that Japan, in the crises which the world holds for her in other places than Tsingtao, will not repeat it.

SIATICS in Europe. In the palace of the English Layard family in Venice used to be one of the world's great portraits-the Sultan Mohammed II, painted by Gentile Bellini. It was contrary to Moslem law and custom to make a likeness of a living person; but the potentate wished it, and the artist accomplished it. The Occident had begun to soften the rigor of the Orient.

We Western nations, in the midst of our prosperity, our education, our popular governments, our railways, our steamships, our engines of war, look down upon Asiatics as weak, effeminate, inferior, declining. Did not the Portuguese break in pieces the Malay power of the East? Did not the English march to and fro through India till they had conquered the whole ? Did not the French in 1860 show their civilization by aiding in the sack of the Winter Palace? Have not the

Russians tamed the intractable Turkomans and the khanates of central Asia ? Has not the United States mastered the Philippine Islands? When has a large and well-supplied force of Europeans been driven from the field by an Asiatic army ?

Many times, scores of times, as recently as the Russo-Japanese War of 1905 ! All the way from Mukden to Châlons, which is near the present battle line of northern France, are scattered battlefields where crows have feasted on the best blood of Europe. One horde after another has poured out of central Asia and pushed westward, often spending years on its gory route. The empire of Alexander the Great, the Roman Empire, the Greek Empire, the Russian Empire, the Bulgarian and Servian Empires, have been at tacked, conquered, and agonized by Asiatics. If the Chinese had the military ardor and

ambition of the Germans or the Belgians, Europe might again have to meet the shock of that Asiatic onset.

That is one side of the intercontinental relation; another side is the spread of Asiatic culture into Europe. Who built the first cities, raised the first regular armies, invented an alphabet, trained physicians, studied the stars, built irrigating canals, erected gorgeous temples, founded state religions, set up governors over conquered provinces, wrote books, and made libraries? Asiatics were the pioneers in every case.. It is not an accident that the three big vital, advancing religions of the twentieth century are all Asiatic in origin. Buddhism started in northern India and has spread eastward to Japan; Mohammedanism, proceeding from Arabia, has overrun at one time or another considerable parts of Asia, Europe, and Africa; Christianity. developed in the ancient Semite race of the Jews, and the Gospels are full of allusions to Asiatic scenery, dress, industry, and social customs. Christian missions are only returning to Asia part of the enlightenment that originally came from that continent. taught Egypt, Egypt taught Crete, Crete taught Greece, Greece taught Rome, Rome taught the world-and there we are!

Asia

Mongolia and Turkestan have been projected those hordes of barbarians who for ages afflicted Europe and who still possess the city of Constantinople and a little territory covering it. The Western world needs to ponder how it came about that wandering nomads, without any wealth except their horses and their cattle, with no arms except what they could make with their own hands, should again and again have overthrown the armored hosts of Europe, defended by the Western armies, by thick walls, strong castles, rich and populous cities, chariots, and war engines. The Huns, the Avars, the Mongols, the Seljuk Turks, and the Ottoman Turks threw themselves upon their enemies with a dash, a ferocity, a drive, which broke through the frontier defenses of Europe as though they were pasteboard.

These untamable Mongol horsemen could not only conquer but hold territory; that is why for a hundred and fifty awful

years Russia was under the Mongol yoke; why the Hungarians still hold the lands which their Asiatic forefathers conquered a thousand years ago; why the Turks established their Empire first in Asia Minor and then in Europe. But till about the year 1300 the Greek Empire of Byzantium was a fortress which withstood the nomads. It is fashionable nowadays to sneer at that Empire, which was the direct successor and continuance of the old Roman Empire. To be sure, the emperors impaled their subjects, and the mob of Constantinople tore emperors to pieces; nevertheless the Empire for a thousand years held together against the unceasing assaults from the East. The Seljuk Turks took possession of the Arabian Empire, were converted to Mohammedanism, and accepted Arabian civilization. Then about the year 1300, just as the Moguls were beginning to lose their hold on Russia, arose the Ottoman Turks. Traveling into Asia Minor a long day from Constantinople eastward by rail you reach El Kischehr, a tame little town, which, nevertheless, was one of the cradles of Ottoman power. The tale is that about sixty horsemen, remnant of a defeated tribe, escaped to that region, accepted Othman or Oshman as their leader, received other refugees and renegades, and thus, without knowing it, founded the Turkish Empire. A considerable part of these recruits were not Turks at all, and there is no evidence that they ever received reinforcements from the region, thousands of miles to the eastward, whence the original Turks came. Whatever the elements of their little commonwealth, they spread westward, crossed the Bosphorus above Constantinople, conquered the center of the Balkans, and in 1365 made Adrianople their capital. By this time they had taken on the aspect of an organized state, and it is almost humorous that they had to defend their little Empire against savage Mongol hordes.

Turkish Conquests in Europe. Possibly if such an Asiatic state were to begin to grow to-day in Asia Minor, all Europe would recognize the danger and unite to crush it. that period of clash and confusion, when the great European states were as yet not completely formed, the frontier was left to defend itself. The result was that on May 29, 1453, while the Portuguese were trying to find a way to Asia around Africa, the Turks opened the straight road to Europe through the capture of Constantinople. It is a ghastly thing (Continued on page following illustrations)