day, who still commands a force of 30,000 men
astride of the Pukow Railway.]

[Illustration: The Bas-relief in a Peking Temple, well illustrating
Indo-Chinese influences.]

The second case was one in which French officialdom by a curious act of
folly gravely alienated Chinese sympathies and gave a powerful weapon to
the German propaganda in China at the end of 1916. The Lao-hsi-kai
dispute, which involved a bare 333 acres of land in Tientsin, has now
taken its place beside the Chengchiatun affair, and has become a leading
case in that great dossier of griefs which many Chinese declare make up
the corpus of Euro-Chinese relations. Here again the facts are
absolutely simple and absolutely undisputed. In 1902 the French consular
authorities in Tientsin filed a request to have their Concession
extended on the ground that they were becoming cramped. The Chinese
authorities, although not wishing to grant the request and indeed
ignoring it for a long time, were finally induced to begin fitful
negotiations; and in October, 1916, after having passed through various
processes of alteration, reduction, and re-statement during the interval
of fourteen years, the issue had been so fined down that a virtual
agreement regarding the administration of the new area had been
reached--an agreement which the Peking Government was prepared to put
into force subject to one reasonable stipulation, that the local
opposition to the new grant of territory which was very real, as Chinese
feel passionately on the subject of the police-control of their
land-acreage, was first overcome. The whole essence or soul of the
disputes lay therein: that the lords of the soil, the people of China,
and in this case more particularly the population of Tientsin, should
accept the decision arrived at which was that a joint Franco-Chinese
administration be established under a Chinese Chairman.

When the terms of this proposed agreement were communicated to the
Tientsin Consulate by the French Legation the arrangement did not please
the French Consul-General, who was under transfer to Shanghai and who
proposed to settle the case to the satisfaction of his nationals before
he left. There is absolutely no dispute about this fact either--namely
that the main pre-occupation of a consular officer, charged primarily
under the Treaties with the simple preservation of law and order among
his nationals, was the closing-up of a vexatious outstanding case, by
force if nece