rnment. They say that some one once wrote a
book entitled, "Advising China to Death," but it was never published.
Some one advised against it, probably.

Another thing that China is not allowed to do is to regulate her
customs duties. This poor old country, rich as she is or as she might
become, has virtually no revenue, for she is allowed to have but a
nominal tariff. There is no use in developing her industries, she can't
protect them, or hedge them in with any sort of protective tariff. It
is not allowed. She must first consult with some seventeen different
powers if she wishes to raise the duty on a single item. And if one
power that does not import a certain article into China is willing to
have a duty laid on that article, this decision will not be agreeable
to another power that imports a lot of it. So it goes. It is pretty
hard to find seventeen powers all in accord. The great nations allow
old China just enough revenue to return to them in the shape of Boxer
indemnities; nothing more.

Oh, disabuse your mind of the fact that China is a sovereign state! She
is bound hand and foot, helpless, mortgaged up to the hilt. Every
foreigner in China knows it, and the Chinese know it themselves only too
well. It seems such a farce to give them the courtesy title of
sovereignty. I don't think you realize, never having been in this
country, what a farce it really is. I am not able to write you a learned
book. All I can do is to write you these letters, which are surely
devoid of all legal verbiage, because I don't know any. If I were a
scholar, a student of international politics, I would wrap all my
statements in fine, well-chosen language, quoting treaties and acts and
agreements and all the rest of it, and you wouldn't know what it all
meant. I can only give you the facts as they disclose themselves to me
from day to day. I can also tell you that every one over here--all the
foreigners I mean--laugh at China and ridicule her and make fun of her
weak, corrupt government, of her inertia and helplessness, and think
what she gets is good enough for her.

I grow so tired of all this talk about the corruptness of the Chinese!
They are corrupt, all the officials, or the greater part of them. But
you don't hear much about those who corrupt them. Why? Because it suits
the great Western nations to keep this government in a state of
weakness, of indecision, of susceptibility to bribes and threats; it
makes China easier to contro