THE BREAKING WAVE

Sleeping under paper umbrellas, and dumping the wounded in pits with the dead, the relentless forces of the Chinese Nationalist army on their northern trek, have provoked the inevitable conflict with Japan. Because this advance endangered the rich Japanese province of Manchuria, and because the Nationalist government is bitterly anti-foreign, such an outbreak has been long foreseen; and because the rivalry which underlies it is basic, the settling agencies are likely to be quilted coolies with machine guns rather than occidentalized diplomats.

People in this country with their extensive fictional knowledge of the yellow people, have complacently left Chinese warfare to the chorus in comic opera. Attended as it is by mass starvation, wholesale looting, and peculiarly Oriental cruelty, the interminable struggle does not, of course, merit such classification, but as a theatrical spectacle, it does provide an interesting analogy to Europe's own rise from feudalism some five centuries ago. For the leaders of both sides are independent lords at the head of vassals whose patriotism is largely a monetary consideration.

But to the growing national consciousness of the South, its ideal of a sovereign China free from foreign influence is attributed the impetus that drives its forces steadily toward Pekin. And in the dispute with dominant Japan, the United States is suggested, as a probable mediator. Because of important American business interests a natural bias will suggest a decision favorable to imperialistic enterprise and prejudicial to the anti-foreign Chinese Nation. Such interference with an independent movement is presently pragmatical, but it forestalls the day when all peoples must be autonomous, and it suggests too much another Nicaragua.