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Article 8 looks entirely unnecessary at a first glance. Yet to
China--and afterward to the world at large--it is perhaps the most
important article in the whole treaty. It aims at restoring Chinese
confidence in foreigners, and will go far toward accomplishing it. Until
that is done, only the drippings (they amount to millions annually)
of the vast fountains of Eastern wealth can be caught by the Western
nations. I have before spoken of an arrogant class of foreigners
in China who demand of the Government the building of railways and
telegraphs, and who assume to regulate and give law to the customs of
trade, almost in open defiance of the constituted authorities. Their
menacing attitude and their threatening language frighten the Chinese,
who know so well the resistless power of the Western nations. They look
upon these things with suspicion. They want railways and telegraphs,
but they fear to put these engines of power into the hands of strangers
without a guaranty that they will not be used for their own oppression,
possibly their destruction. Even as it is now, foreigners can go into
the interior and commit wrongs upon the people with impunity, for their
"
extra territorial" privileges leave them answerable only to their
own laws, administered upon their own domain or "concessions." These
concessions" being far from the scene of the crime, it does not pay
"
to send witnesses such distances, and so the wrong goes untried and
unpunished. There are other obstacles to the immediate construction of
the demanded internal improvements--among them the inherent prejudice
of
the untaught mass of the common people against innovation. It is sad
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