ssary, before he handed over his office to his successor.
It was with this idea that an ultimatum was drawn up by the French
Consul General and, having been weakly approved by the French Legation,
was handed to the Chinese local authorities. It gave them a time-limit
of twenty-four hours in which to effect the complete police evacuation
of the coveted strip of territory on the ground that the delay in the
signature of a formal Protocol had been wilful and deliberate and had
closed the door to further negotiations; and as no response came at the
end of the time-limit, an open invasion of Chinese territory was
practised by an armed French detachment; nine uniformed Chinese
constables on duty being forcibly removed and locked up in French
barracks and French sentries posted on the disputed boundary.

The result of this misguided action was an enormous Chinese outcry and
the beginning of a boycott of the French in North China,--and this in
the middle of a war when France has acted with inspiring nobility. Some
2,000 native police, servants and employe's promptly deserted the French
Concession _en masse_; popular unions were formed to keep alive
resentment; and although in the end the arrested police were set at
liberty, the friendly intervention of the Allies proved unable to effect
a settlement of the case which at the moment of writing remains
precisely where it was a year ago.[24]

Here you have the matter of foreign interests in China explained in the
sense that they appear to Chinese. It is not too much to say that this
illustration of the deliberate lawlessness, which has too often been
practised in the past by consuls who are simply Justices of the Peace,
would be incredible elsewhere; and yet it is this lawlessness which has
come to be accepted as part and parcel of what is called "policy" in
China because in the fifty years preceding the establishment of the
Republic a weak and effeminate mandarinate consistently sought safety in
surrenders. It is this lawlessness which must at all costs be suppressed
if we are to have a happy future. The Chinese people have so far
contented themselves by pacific retaliation and have not exploded into
rage; but those who see in the gospel of boycott an ugly manifestation
of what lies slumbering should give thanks nightly that they live in a
land where reason is so supreme. Think of what might not happen in China
if the people were not wholly reasonable! Throughout the length and
b