a public interview, called attention to the
disreputable condition and appearance of the leading station
(Shimbashi) in the Japanese capital, declaring that foreign tourists
must inevitably have their general impressions of the country
unfavorably influenced by it, so primitive and uninviting is its
appearance. But when it comes to the South Manchurian Railway, also
under the control of the Japanese Government (five sixths of the
investment held by the government and one {86} sixth by individual
Japanese), one finds an entirely different policy in force. Handsome
stations, built to accommodate traffic for fifty years to come, have
been erected. In Dairen, "virtually the property of the railway
company," the system has built a magnificent modern city--street
railways, waterworks, electric light plants, macadamized roads, and
beautiful public parks. More than this, the railway company, not
content with the best of equipment for every phase of legitimate
railway work, including handsome stations and railway offices, such as
Japan proper never sees, has also erected hotels which, for the
Orient, may well be styled sumptuous, in five leading cities of
Manchuria. Comparatively few travellers go to Mukden, and yet the
hotel which the South Manchurian Railway has erected there, for
example, is perhaps not excelled in point of furnishing and equipment
anywhere in the Far East.

In buying back the railroads, therefore, China will be expected not
only to pay for the railways themselves but for all the irrelevant
enterprises--hotels, parks, cities--in which the railway companies
have embarked; for lines "improved" beyond recognition, and for lines
built not even with a view to ultimate profit, but for their strategic
importance to a rival and possibly antagonist nation! As an Englishman
said to me: "It's much the same as if I, a poor man, should rent you a
$1000 house, agreeing to stand the expense of some improvements when
taking it back, and you should spend $10,000 in improving my $1000
house--and largely to suit your own peculiar business and purposes."

More than this, Japan, as I have said, is determined to keep her
absolute monopoly on South Manchurian railway facilities. In Article
IV of the Portsmouth Peace Treaty Japan and Russia reciprocally
engaged not to "obstruct any general measures, common to all
countries, which China may take for the development of the commerce
and industry of Manchuria," but in December of the