the Chief Executive was empowered to sell arms and ammunition acquired since April 6, 1917, provided that the purchasing foreign state or government was engaged in war against any government with which the United States was then at war; and that, by virtue of the Act of June 5, 1920, the Secretary of War was authorized to sell to any foreign government with which the United States was then at peace any matériel, supplies, or equip ment pertaining to the military establishment as might then or subsequently be found to be surplus and not needed for military purposes.

It will be observed that the authorization of 1920 refers to matériel, supplies, and equipment which may be surplus or not needed for military purposes and not possessing an adequate domestic market. Let us first consider the adequacy of the domestic market. For Enfield rifles, and for ammunition and airplanes such as were sold to Mexico, there can hardly be said to have existed no adequate domestic market in 1923-24. Moreover, one would suppose that the Director of Sales of the War Department would have freely advertised such matériel for sale at about that time if he had had available stocks thereof. It may be, of course, that private correspondence or circulars were dispatched by the Department to prospective purchasers, but we are precluded from believing that such was the case because of the failure of the Secretary of War to submit copies of such documents when the Senate requested them. Whether or not the market existed, one may conclude that the Department had made no effort to determine its adequacy.

The question then arises whether the property sold to Mexico could be classified as not needed for military purposes and 'surplus.' If the country

were at peace, presumably no readily replaceable military stores could be characterized as immediately necessary for military purposes; but as long as material had been acquired or manufactured for the use of the army and had not yet become obsolete, or even obsolescent, it would be presumed to be required for the military purposes for which the money expended upon it had been appropriated. In and out of Congress, between 1916 and 1921, there had been ample demonstration of the time required to produce highgrade rifles, machine guns, ammunition, and aircraft. Nor is the elastic term 'surplus' capable of being stretched indefinitely. It is true that during the years just after the Armistice the War Department had on hand far more supplies than it was likely to have occasion to use in the immediate future, but, as was the case with other departments of the federal government, a robust ambition to get rid of existing stocks and replace them with improved models had stimulated very considerably the estimation of 'surpluses.' The writer spent those years in the Treasury, and had frequent opportunity to observe this interesting phenomenon. In any event, the lists of inquiries received by the Department for arms, ammunition, and aircraft to be found at the end of the document we have been quoting indicate that inquiries for arms and munitions even subsequent to the Act of June 5, 1920, when emanating from countries this side of the Atlantic, had not been satisfied, with the exception of some negligible orders of Krag rifles for Nicaragua in 1921, of which we shall have more to say presently. On the other hand, it is rather significant that numerous requests by European governments, lately associated with the United States in the war, for rifles, machine guns, and other materials

had to be rejected for lack of a surplus. On June 5, 1922, the Jugoslav Government, which had been able to buy several million dollars' worth of such supplies in 1919, requested 500,000 Springfield and Enfield rifles, 500,000,000 cartridges, 4000 machine guns, and other substantial items. The notation in the list with the Secretary of War's reply reads as follows: 'No sale. No surplus available. Advised to arrange with manufacturers.'

One might go further and have a tenable basis for challenging the applicability of the act of June 5, 1920, to any sale of arms and munitions whatsoever to Mexico, regardless of the existence of bona fide surpluses. Only countries with which the United States was at peace on June 5, 1920, could be considered among possible purchasers. By the suspension of all diplomatic relations after the assassination of President Carranza, the short-lived restoration of normal relations between Mexico and the United States that had begun with President Wilson's recognition of Carranza gave place to relations somewhat difficult to describe, but hardly in any case to be given the full content of a state of normal, peaceful intercourse such as the courts have had occasion to define in construing the effect of pre-war and post-war treaties with Germany. How many members of the Congress which granted the authorization to the Executive to sell surplus arms to countries with which we were at peace would have included in that category the unhappy neighbor just previously thrust once more into international quarantine by the shocking murder of its president?

III

The army officers who opposed the sales of arms to any of the factions in Mexico had correctly visualized the

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consequences of this transaction. They foresaw the use that would be made of the precedent by this, that, and the other Latin American group hoping to secure from Washington an official certification of the legitimacy of its claims. They realized, of course, that it was not the particular store of arms which the prospective buyers would want, since the material they desired could be bought much more easily and promptly from private manufacturers, but rather the moral support to their claims which the transaction would each time involve.

Small wonder, then, that the officials who had to bolster up the sale of arms went about their task with slight enthusiasm. When it came to giving precedents for the sale to the Mexican Government, the subordinates of the Secretary of War could find but one genuine case of a sale of arms by one government to another, wholly outside the purview of the authorization of 1918 of sales to cobelligerents and the special case of Cuba - namely, the sale of a hundred thousand rifles by the Imperial Arsenal of AustriaHungary to the Confederate States in 1861. The Secretary of War also referred to the sale of arms to the Kolchak Government of Russia in 1919, but inasmuch as Secretary Lansing's letter cited by him specifically justifies this sale on the ground that the government represented in Washington by Ambassador Bakhmeteff was considered to be a cobelligerent of the United States and therefore entitled to enjoy the advantages of the act of July 9, 1918, the precedent simply did not exist. Reference was also made to a loan of ammunition by authorization of President Roosevelt in 1906 to a firm holding a contract with the Cuban Government; but this case was equally irrelevant, for it was admittedly based upon special legislation relating to

Cuba, growing out of the Platt Amendment and Cuba's clearly limited sovereignty.

As might have been foreseen, use was made of the Obregón-Calles precedent within a very short time. We have already referred to the sale of arms to the Government of Cuba in May 1924, and the reference to the transaction with General Obregón as its justification an unconscious assimilation of Mexico's status to that of Cuba. In the summer of 1924 several million dollars' worth of arms and war material was sold to a faction in Honduras. Other instances might be cited, but it will perhaps be sufficient to close with a reference to the sale to the Government of Nicaragua in February 1927.

It is perhaps worth while to reproduce the statement issued by the Department of State to the press on March 23, 1927, concerning this transaction:

The Nicaraguan Government has purchased from the United States War De

partment: 3000 Krag rifles; 200 Browning machine guns with accessories; and 3,000,000 rounds of ammunition, the total price being $217,718. The Nicaraguan Government gives notes in the sum of $5000 each up to the total of the purchase price. The notes mature monthly and bear interest at 6 per cent, the first note to be paid on January 31, 1929.

These are the same terms upon which rifles, machine guns, and ammunition were sold to the Nicaraguan Government by the United States War Department in November 1921, at which time the Nicaraguan Government purchased 10,000 Krag rifles with 6,000,000 rounds of ammunition and 50 machine guns with 1,000,000 rounds of ammunition, total price $170,585 with interest at 6 per cent payable in 33 notes of $5000 each and one note for the balance, the first note payable January 3, 1924. These notes have all been paid off.

These munitions were sold under a contract dated February 25, 1927, and have been shipped from the United States and

are now in Nicaragua. They were represented by the Nicaraguan Government as being urgently needed to maintain law and order in the country and suppress threatened the Constitutional Government revolutionary activities which not only of Nicaragua but also the lives and property of Americans and other foreigners.

It will be recalled that a similar transaction was entered into early in 1924 with the Obregón Government in Mexico after its recognition by this Government and during the de la Huerta revolution. The War Department sold on credit to the Obregón Government arms and munitions of the value of approximately $1,250,000.

The reference in the second paragraph of this statement to the transaction of November 1921 might lead the reader to suppose and was perhaps so intended that the Chief Executive possessed the same authorization in 1927 that he had enjoyed in 1921 for sales of War Department property to foreign governments. But in 1921 there were still available supplies of arms and munitions manufactured during the war and available for sale under the terms of the act of 1918 to which we have referred; and Nicaragua was one of the countries associated with the United States in the war against Germany. The material sold in 1927, however, can hardly be classifiable as 'surplus,' if the annual reports of the Secretary of War in recent years as to the needs and requirements of the military establishment are to be believed. Whatever may have been the case in 1921 with regard to authorization under the act of 1918, it is asking too much of us to invite us, in the face of insistent demands on the part of the military authorities for appropriations with which to expand the resources at their disposal, to assume that there are now, or have recently been, any 'surpluses' available for sale under the act of 1920. It is hardly possible to express too

emphatically the regret that a student of our foreign policy must feel on reviewing the deplorable intervention in Mexico's internal affairs at the beginning of 1924. It has given rise to a series of incidents in other countries, and it could conceivably have a profound bearing upon critical conditions at home in certain circumstances. That act of intervention not only complicated the situation in Mexico, as those who sanctioned it and many who endorsed it were soon destined to find out, but it also exposed the United States to an equivocal position in international discussions regarding every aspect of the problem of regulating the malodorous traffic in arms. The hypothesis may seem extreme, and yet, in effect, what else did the transaction signify than the transformation of the relations between Mexico and the United States from those between two sovereign states to those which obtain between a limited sovereignty and a state which furnishes the final sanctions - as, for example, Cuba and the United States? By its decisive intervention in the internal political affairs of Mexico at the end of 1923, our government consciously or otherwise assumed moral sponsorship for the

validity of the acts of the administration it sought to reënforce. Will anyone seriously question the likelihood that, if the United States were not the great world power that it is, European governments, seeking to hold someone legally as well as morally responsible for the confiscation of Mexican property of their nationals, would have little difficulty in persuading an impartial tribunal of the full liability of paramount sovereignty?

The departure from our traditional policy of nonintervention in the internal affairs of other countries involved in this reprehensible transaction of 1923-24 is destined to have far worse consequences for this republic than the resale of the military equipment we sold to Obregón to a Nicaraguan faction friendly to Calles. How remote now seems the outlook of a Secretary of State, who could write, as Cass did to our Minister in Mexico in March 1859 (Moore's Digest of International Law, par. 898), that, however great might be the sympathy of the people of the United States for the cause of the Liberal Party in Mexico, 'our government cannot properly intervene in its behalf without violating a cardinal feature of our foreign policy.'

WHEN, shortly after the inauguration of the nominally Republican Government at Peking and the abdication. of the Manchu dynasty, I had the honor of lecturing on the Far Eastern question at various centres of learning in America, I found myself at a loss to account for the optimism generally prevalent in the United States with regard to the future of China. A book which I wrote at that time, in which I summarized the actual position in 1912, and from it predicted the chaos which has since prevailed, was generally received with polite incredulity. Both by my audiences and by the press it was borne in upon me very clearly that mine was a voice crying in the wilderness of unbelief. My views were regarded as 'reactionary,' those of an incorrigible monarchist, incapable of appreciating the regenerating virtue of Young China's enthusiasm for republicanism and democratic institutions. It was natural enough that public opinion in the States should be disposed to sympathize with the aspirations of the Chinese intellectuals who proclaimed their fervent belief in American ideals and their professed determination to apply them for the benefit of their country. Misled by their eloquent appeals, the imagination of the American people saw China, with the eye of faith, as a great nation of philosophers and scholars, like Wu Ting-fang and Wellington Koo, heading straight for the Promised Land of peaceful

prosperity. Last, but not least, the path to an unbiased judgment of the Far Eastern question was darkened for many by the shadow of the AngloJapanese Alliance.

Then came the Great War - the years that the locusts have eaten. On the course of events in China during those four years it is unnecessary, for our present purposes, to dwell. I would only observe, looking back, that the Allies probably never committed a more shortsighted error than when they decided to bribe China (there is no other word) to declare war upon the Central Powers, and thus enabled her, without having to have a ship or a soldier, to deprive Germans and Austrians not only of their extraterritorial privileges but of a considerable amount of capital and valuable property. Having regard to the realities of the situation in China and to the wider interests of humanity, it was a blunder which the civilized nations were bound to regret before long, if only because it precluded for many a day all possibility of that united international action whereby alone the Chinese nation can be saved from the dangers of disintegration which threaten it. But in 1917, when for purely financial ends China was induced to declare herself a belligerent, public opinion in America and England was already feeling the influence of the sentimental enthusiasms associated with the name of President Wilson, which finally played