particularly Continental, nations, and she is sufficiently privileged to desire the use of force no more for purposes of aggression than for needs of defense. Meanwhile the insistence of many American peace idealists that America must not enter Europe and make its problems ours until Europe disavows the use of force merely tends to become an ethical sublimation of an essentially selfish national position. It gives moral sanction to a policy of isolation which has its real basis in quite other considerations. The real reason why we do not associate intimately with Europe is that we have many advantages which might be sacrificed in a too intimate fellowship. The general effect of the outlawry programme is to beguile a nation which stands aloof to preserve the advantages of its strength into believing that it stands alone to preserve the advantages of its virtue.

In this connection it is to be noted that some of our statesmen and publicists who are most critical of European armaments and the alleged sanction of war in the Covenant of the League of Nations are the very ones who are most unyielding in the matter of Interallied debts. Senator Borah, who is in many respects the most honest and rugged statesman in Washington, and whose attitude in regard to Oriental and South American questions is probably the greatest single force for the moralizing of our national conduct, is singularly obtuse in regard to this European problem. For the peace of the world it would be an immeasurable advantage if we could forget some of our moral scruples against Europe for the sake of entering into a more intimate fellowship with her, in which there might be some chance of mitigating the fears and hatreds which American wealth and strength are creating in impoverished Europe.

preparedness represent the sober common sense of the nation against the moral obfuscation of many peace enthusiasts. A strong and privileged nation, strong enough to be emancipated from the fear of any immediate attack, and privileged enough to need nothing which the force of arms might be able to secure, may indulge the peace ideal for the moment. But ultimately both its strength and its privilege will incite enmity and aggression. Except it uses its strength more wisely than seems probable from past history, and shares its privileges more unselfishly than any nation has yet been inclined to, it is bound to array the world against it. That is the prospect which America faces.

Those of us who are pacifists ought to realize more clearly than we do that spiritual attitudes can never guarantee us security in the possession of material advantages. There is much to be said for the position that a civilization and a culture may not only be protected without the use of force, but that they can be maintained incorruptibly in no other way. But it requires an army to preserve a higher standard of living than the rest of the world enjoys. An essentially selfish nation cannot afford to be trusting. Its selfishness destroys the redemptive and morally creative power of its trust.

Many individual idealists are taking the justified position that the best way to bring unethical groups under ethical control is to disassociate themselves clearly from the unethical conduct of the group, at whatever cost. Too few of them have realized that, if such action is to be morally redemptive, it must disassociate the individual not only from the policy of using physical force but from the policy of insisting on material advantages which destroy human fellowship and make the use of

VOL. 139-NO. 5

C

answered, 'Canton.' I handed her my purse. A young girl grasped my wrists and helped me aboard. The vessel was packed with Cantonese men, women, and children, and I recognized many faces I had seen among the refugees who ran away before the Radical capture of Canton.

"Thou returnest home, Honored One?' I said to the woman who held my purse and who now made room for me to sit beside her.

'We return and thou?' she responded.

'I also return to my home,' I replied. The afternoon passed in idle talk, in which we women compared ages, told the number of our children, and sympathized with each other over babies we had lost. We ate salted watermelon seeds, nibbled chocolate, and quenched our thirst with fresh lichi fruit. They smoked their water pipes and laughed at my clumsy attempts to keep one alight. At the Tiger Forts we discussed the signs of new fortifications - earth had been thrown up and rough shelters of bamboo placed at intervals over the hills. They explained to me that in 'old' China the forts had had no guns; only pictures of fierce tigers pasted over the windows. My friends said these had served as a device to remind the people of the power of the law and had been much better than modern methods.

All about us was the drone of men's voices discussing political eventsthe discomfort to be borne if there should be a boycott against all Western imports, and at the same time the necessity of teaching the Western merchant certain truths regarding the supremacy of the 'Celestial' people.

Night came. The boat dropped anchor. The last breeze died down. Mosquitoes came in millions to torment us as we lay in sultry heat, crowded so close that our bodies touched.

My nostrils rebelled at the mingled odors of putrid water, sour salt perspiration from my unbathed fellow passengers, and the nasty offal of our cargo of live pigs. From nightfall to dawn the hours dragged to the slow torture of the squeal of thirsty pigs and the rancorous voice of a political agitator haranguing the assembled multitude, who were attempting to sleep, on their cowardly submission to the indignity of Western interference in China. My new friend and I moved restlessly in vain attempts to find comfort on the hard boards of the deck. I longed for a drink of water.

With the dawn my eyes rested upon the muddy waters from which had risen the rancid odor of the night. Lifted high on strong clean stocks above glossy wide leaves, lotus buds were opening to the light. They covered all the space to the shore pure white just touched with shell pink. Dainty beauty rising out of foul slime - each blossom as fragile as a floating wisp of sun-kissed morning cloud.

When we were within sight of Canton two launches flying red flags came out and escorted us to a position opposite the Customs wharf. Delegates came aboard from the launches, wearing sleeve bands announcing that they came from the strikers' headquarters and the Seamen's Union. They made speeches of greeting, welcoming the returned refugees to their homes and assuring them that all former discomfort had been the fault of interfering Westerners; that the back of Western influence in China had been broken by the new Nationalist Party; that missionaries were to go; that all the teaching of the young was to be done under government control. One of the speakers asked me in English if I was a missionary. I answered no. He said it was a good thing, because the new régime would not tolerate Christian teaching.

Another delegate asked me about my business. I said I was just a housekeeper. A crowd gathered. Someone suggested that I must be a spy. They shook their heads and agreed that there was something wrong about a white woman speaking both Mandarin and the local dialect. The woman who had befriended me said that she thought I was quite harmless, but a little queer in the head. I sat down on a box and waited for the business of disembarking to draw their attention away from me. The wealthier of my fellow travelers, suspicious of the free ride to shore offered by the launches, gave polite evasive answers to the invitation and hired private sampans. The launches finally went away with the shabbier of our company. Two slipper-boat women vied with each other for the opportunity to row a passenger ashore. The one who lost cried, 'You take the bread out of my mouth!' after her successful rival.

I leaned over the rail and offered her a good sum to convey me to shore.

'I have no leisure,' was her calm reply, as she rocked on idle oars.

III

The red flag with the Rising Sun, symbol of the Nationalist Government, fastened by the Labor delegates to the mast of our boat, drooped in the breathless heat. My friendly companions of the voyage had melted away the instant suspicion was pointed at me by the red-necktied committee. Even the woman who had vouchsafed that I was harmless had gone without farewell.

Red flags hung like strings from buildings on the Canton Bund, and from every junk, steam vessel, flower boat, and sampan in sight. The boatwoman who had declined to accept me as a passenger lay down in the bottom of her craft. I saw a bright twist of red

cotton cloth plaited in her long black hair. Then I noticed similar red in the braids of all the other boatwomen.

On the faces of the cook's coolie, the boat's guard, and all the women and children on near-by craft lay a blank mask of unconcern which I knew meant intense excitement at the drama of a white woman stranded in midharbor on an empty vessel. They are a race of infinite patience - they waited for the next act in the play. Life among the Chinese has taught me the art of patient waiting also. I stretched out on the top of a long packing box and closed my eyes as though to sleep.

After a weary, apprehensive hour I saw a trim government launch, flying the new flag. I signaled it audaciously, on the chance that no officials would be aboard at six in the morning, and that the men in charge, accustomed to obey commands and rattled by the rapid changes in authority of recent days, would obey me without question as to what right I had to give orders.

I berated them soundly in Mandarin for their slackness in keeping me waiting. The wrinkled old boatswain murmured polite apologies. I was bowed aboard. The folk on near-by craft waved a cheery farewell. The launch landed me without question at the steps of the British Concession.

The British sentinel a young civilian volunteer - stared at me in amazement as I came off the 'enemy' launch. Then he recovered his senses sufficiently to repeat the order that no women were allowed to return to Shameen. He had been a guest many times in my house he could n't very well push me backward into the river. I suggested that he walk to the other end of his beat so that he could n't see me come up the steps. He did.

The imported shrubs and flowers which had made Shameen a beautiful garden were dead for lack of artificial

watering. The native grass had in one short week grown to a tangled mass. Only the banyan trees, native to the tropics, were in full leaf. Hastily thrown-up trenches, barbed wire, and walls of sandbags added to the desolation. The Punjabi troops had been quartered next to our house. They had flung out white tents and tethered black goats on the grass. Brightturbaned cooks were preparing food over open charcoal burners. A circle of men, in odd khaki shirts with long tails outside knee breeches, played cards under our flame-of-the-woods tree. A little black boy, with a brilliant striped shawl-like garment draped over one shoulder, leaving the right arm and side bare, was pouring a pail of water around the tree's trunk. Two bearded men were smoking a hookah between them. Several others were enjoying a morning dip from the stone embankment in front of our gate; they rubbed their copper bodies with oil from a green bottle until they glistened in the morning sun, then one by one they dived slowly and gracefully into the muddy river. Each swimmer exhibited a different dive.

The loved flowers of my garden were withered corpses. I hastened past them and pushed open a side door. In the dusty, littered breakfast room my husband explained to me the enormity of the offense I had committed in returning to my home when I had been sent away by the British and American consuls. But a man in our house lay very ill. I busied myself with the tasks which a woman can do better than men and kept quietly out of everyone's way. So they let me stay.

because of the stoppage of trade, whistled as they trundled home their daily supply of food from the distributing station and prepared it in stifling kitchens. They kept up their morale, their clothes washed, their faces shaved; they took pride in inventing edible dishes out of available ingredients; and they accepted without grumbling the heavy community duties assigned them by the Emergency Council.

Once we did not have bread or flour for eight days. Fruit, fowl, and green vegetables were a far-between luxury sent up from Hongkong when possible, but a scarcity there also because of the boycott. Down the river past us floated flat-bottomed craft piled high with the rich produce of Kwangtung Province: plump young chickens and ducks, high pyramids of juicy oranges, pale yellow much-needed lemons, great clusters of bananas, baskets of papayas, spinach, lettuce, new potatoes, and snowy cauliflower - all those foods that the palate, fed too long on salt and storage meat and canned stuffs, craves.

Once, just at twilight, I sat alone on the steps of the deserted boathouse. A boat loaded with golden papayas floated slowly downstream, poled by a kind-faced old man. Scarce above a whisper I bartered with him. His boat drew close, a coin passed from my hand to his, and when he had gone two ripe melons lay under the fold of my skirt. Many months later I learned that the poor old man paid with his life for that transgression of the boycott against Westerners. Convicted in the Hall of Justice, he was wrapped with thin wire and laid out in the sun to die of slow strangulation. A sampan woman whom neither of us noticed made the charge against him.

Long, monotonous days passed. The Chinese Nationalist officials, still uncertain of their own saddle, refused to treat with the Western world. Internal

disruption claimed their attention, and with canny wisdom they knew that only by distracting the attention of the multitude with the decoy of a common Western enemy could they mould a national unity.

On July 29, Jacob Boradin, a Russian from Moscow, was openly announced as the chief adviser to the Government. Mr. Norman, an American, and formerly adviser to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, sailed for home. The morning of August 1, five hundred thousand dollars consigned from Russia was brought in at Whampoa to aid the Nationalist Party. A day later ships laden with badly needed oil arrived from the Black Sea. On August 4 an order was issued by the newly formed Central Bank of China that henceforth only notes issued by that bank would be legal tender in South China. The telegraphs, customs, railways, and post offices were directed to accept only such notes after the fifteenth of August. Western officials in these departments chafed under the order, which had no authority from Peking; but such was the strength of the rising Nationalist Party that it was put into effect. The Bank redeems its notes daily with the posts and the customs, giving to them the face value in silver.

New import duties were declared, in addition to the regular customs tariff. No boat was allowed to move cargo until these duties were paid. Contrary to the regulation that all customs returns are to be sent to Peking, the local party declared its right to put them into the Nationalists' coffers. Thus the long battle between the customs authorities and the Nationalists was inaugurated.

Unsigned letters began to reach Shameen showing great apprehension on the part of certain Chinese Conservatives and calling upon the Foreign Powers to use their 'magnificent'

battleships to 'break the back of the bloodsucking, upstart' Nationalist Party. Letters came from servants who had left their Western jobs at the instigation of the general strike of June 21. They told of the horrors of road building, under Russian overseers, into which they had been conscripted; they complained that they were paid no wages and given only one small bowl of rice a day. They begged their 'masters' to find a way to smuggle them back to the island.

On August 18, with the heat at ninety-nine degrees, the workers in the native waterworks, which supplies the entire city, walked out in protest against an order of the Nationalist Government. The people were forced to carry water from the river, which is the emptying place for all sewage. An epidemic of typhoid broke out. People died by hundreds.

Life on August 19 was brightened by a visit of the British flagship Petersfield with Prince George, the fourth son of the King of England, on board. He came ashore dressed in gray trousers and blue coat. He proved a tall, goodlooking, nice-mannered youth, and was much interested in the way in which life on Shameen was conducted.

On August 21, Liao Chung-kai, the 'strong man' of the Nationalist Government, was shot as he left a public meeting. News travels on wings in China. There was a difference in attitude at once on the part of the boat people in front of our house. For the first time since my return to Shameen they passed the time of day with me as I watered the flowers in my garden. They commented upon my clean starched frock and asked me if I had laundered it myself. They explained that the fifth day of the Seventh Moon (August 23, Western calendar) was the Festival of Ch'u shu - or the Stopping of Great Heat.