While researching my doctoral dissertation way back when, I came across this fascinating article republished in The China Weekly Review in 1929. The author gives us an account of life in Harbin, Manchuria in the 1920s, with a special focus on the Russians and their relations with Chinese and Japanese in that city and in Manchuria and other parts of China. We are given some glimpses into the lives of the destitute Russians who fled the revolution that gave birth to the Soviet Union, and how their plight, as well as the rise of Japan since the Russo-Japanese War of 1904, was changing the status of white people in the Far East.  There are a few tantalizing tidbits about the nightlife of Shanghai and Harbin and the roles Russian women played in the cabarets of those cities. Since I didn’t know anything about the author, I searched for her online and came up with this account of her life, which is fascinating on its own. Clearly Olive Gilbreath was a person who knew this part of the world firsthand and who had suffered many indignities brought upon by the Second World War and the advance of the Japanese Army in China. She must have thought it quite ironic that the Soviets gave Manchuria over to the Chinese Red Army after the end of WWII. 

Source: Findagrave.com (accessed on Dec 23 2020) “Olive Gilbreath grew up in La Plata, Missouri and graduated from La Plata High School in 1900. She entered Wellesley College in Massachusetts, and received a Bachelor's and Master's degree from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. She then taught English for two years at the University of Kansas. Due to the influence of family and friends, she became interested in Russia and Russian Literature. After college she left to travel the Far East. Interested in Russia, she headed there, waiting in Peking, China for four months until permission was granted. 

Olive was caravaning in Mongolia, beyond the Great Wall of China, when WWI broke out in 1914. A railroad ticket for Russia was already in her pocket, but American officials in China refused to allow her passage. The Russian minister, however, allowed her to cross Siberia to St. Petersburg via the Trans-Siberian Railroad in the private car of a Russian general and his aides. This journey lasted 16 days. Upon her arrival in St. Petersburg in 1915, where she worked at the American Hospital there, she was witness to the outbreak of the Russian Revolution. 

In the fall of 1918, as there were Americans in Siberia giving help to the Russians, she traveled on a Red Cross train as an interpreter for the doctors. This journey formed the basis for her first book, "Miss Amerikanka", which was originally serialized in Harpers Magazine in 1918. Her trans-Siberan journey and the days immediately following in St. Petersburg and Moscow, are described in a romantic, diaristic style. Her second book, "If To-Day Have No Tomorrow", a poignant tale of the effects of the Russian Revolution on an aristocratic Russian family during the Bolshovik Revolution, is a masterpiece. As a foreign correspondent, she wrote for "Harper's," "Yale Review" and "Asia Magazine". 

In 1934 she was married in London to her life-long friend Daniel David McLorn, an Englishman who was serving as the Deputy Director General to the Postal Bank for all of China. They made their home in the international settlement in Shanghai. Since Mr. McLorn had established many small banks all over China, he refused to leave during the outbreak of WWII. He realized that the Japanese would destroy the banks, but he hoped that his staying would keep them open longer. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941, he was interred in China by occupying Japanese forces for 2 1/2 years at a Japanese concentration camp near Shanghai. As an American, Olive could have returned home, but she chose to stay with her husband. They were released at the end of the war in 1945.

In the late 1940s, both returned to the U.S. and settled in Olive's hometown of La Plata, to her Queen Anne Victorian home built by her parents. Mr. McLorn died in June, 1974. Olive lived her last remaining years in La Plata and offered many gracious contributions throughout the state, including a large donation to the University of Missouri's Museum of Art and Archeology, including a priceless art collection of Asian artifacts from various dynasties. A wing in their gallery bears her name.”

Where Yellow Rules White

BY OLIVE GILBREATH

(Harper's Magazine for February)

(The China Weekly Review Mar 30, 1929)

NOT even in the days of marsh monsters has the world been more packed with drama than it is to-day: the drama of the air, the drama of far continents, the drama of under the sea, the drama of ideas, of electrons, and of ether. Not least of all, that toward which all others seem to lead—the drama of changing peoples, of shifting social orders and races. Every now and then the center of the human drama leaps to a new corner of the globe. In the past few years it has reverted to those level plains from which the horsemen of Genghis Khan set out to conquer Asia and Europe. Let the man who does not believe this journey to China. And let him make the journey by way of Russia. In Russia he will see an absolute bouleversement within the white race—a new social order under the sun. In China he will be confronted by something even more astounding. He will see a reversal in the relations of the white and yellow races. The most memorable sight in the East to-day is not Yokohama struggling up from the ashes or the modern stone buildings of Shanghai or Tokio. It is North Manchuria—a Chinese policeman beating a white driver.

Ever since the Kaiser coined the phrase “the Yellow Peril" it has maintained journalists in the style to which they were accustomed. But while the hue and cry have been hawked in the streets by newspapers, it is little realized that in one city in the world the thing is a fait accompli: the Oriental has ascended to the seats of power, is sitting there, and has been sitting there for some time. This city is Harbin, the only white city in the world run by yellows.

In appearance Harbin is pure Russian. There is little to suggest that it is not a city of black earth Orel or Tver. Like most Slav cities, it has never been able to pull itself together but wanders over the plain, old Harbin here, new Harbin there and, in a different quarter along the magnificent Sungari River, the Port: all laced together by wide streets and mammoth bridges—the only scale that the Russian seems to know. The cobbled streets are the same as those of Moscow, and the horses’ hoofs that clatter down them. The capacious stone buildings that line the streets, the shops, and the cinema are similar to those that rise in Vladivostok or Leningrad. The steamers on the river are Russian; the twisted green and gold spires of the churches and the little kiosks. The traktirs and gardens are Russian, and in them sit Russian crowds eating sunflower seeds. The music is Russian, the gaiety and melancholy, the cafes and the caviar. The smell is Russian. Need anything further be said?

A Curious Flag

In the bright Manchurian sun, however, flies one of the most curious flags in the world: the upper half is the Chinese five-barred flag, the lower—not the upper—half is the Soviet sickle and hammer. Down the street clatters a Russian izvostchik, swinging his long whip over his shaggy Siberian pony. In the old days that long careless whip would certainly have flicked any Chinese tardily crossing the road. Now the traffic policeman who puts up his hand at which the bearded Jehu stops short has a yellow skin and slant eyes. If there is an altercation the Russian will be slapped or beaten before a crowd and there is no redress. If he is arrested, it is the heavy hand of the yellow that hales him to the yamen, and the justice he meets is yellow. The mass of the city is white, but the wires, the antennae that control it are Chinese. The whole administration, in short, of this Russian city of eighty thousand is Chinese. If you rise early enough you may even see the Chinese mayor making his rounds. He is a Buddhist scholar and rises at six to see if the municipal plant is working.

To the man who revisits the Far East this spectacle is as astonishing as seeing the Mississippi run dry or the Statue of Liberty fall upon her face. After he has recovered from the first bewilderment the spectacle teems with questions. How did it come about? Is the administration efficient? If so, why? Especially does the traveler ask this if he has just come up from China proper and witnessed the chaos there: the threatened disorganization of the posts, the bankruptcy of the telegraph, the ruin of the railways under advancing Chinese control. Is it possible that this experiment here in the north suggests that, if once he could be extracted from the melee of rival war lords, the Chinese might not prove incapable of governing? How does the Russian react toward this Chinese overlordship?

II

The history of the bouleversement is simple. It is another wave caused by the mammoth stone which the Russian Revolution heaved into the world pool. Up until 1918, though on Manchurian territory, Harbin had been a Russian city. But in 1918 the White Russians, mainly the officials of the Chinese Eastern Railway, seeing the Bolshevik wave advancing across the Urals and hoping to save Harbin, invited the Chinese to come in and rule their own house. The Chinese needed no second invitation. They came, and they brought an iron hand for their dealings with the whites. In spite of the defense measure, however, the Soviet took possession of the Chinese Eastern Railway. Their first step was to abrogate the former treaties and give to China half the control of the Chinese Eastern Railway. But the Chinese did not halve the control of the city. In all that concerns city administration they are still the sole masters.

Does Chinese policing of a white city work Well? It depends upon the standards—Spotless Town or East of Suez. As East of Suez goes, Harbin is clean and safe, but East of Suez does not go far in either of these directions. Its forte is neither soap nor salubrity. Perhaps the most one can say is that the city plant has not visibly deteriorated, but perhaps it could not if Chinese coolies armed with long brush brooms sweep the streets. After several months it was discovered that they only swept the dirt from one side of the street to the other. A few Russians were added, and the streets are now as clean as ever. The traveler need no longer give Harbin a wide berth. Not many years ago, the Harbin, and Vladivostok papers read like a Police Gazette. The visitor venturing up from Peking or over from Japan, after perusing the police report of the night before, warily transferred his bags to Changchun and fled back to civilization.

He no longer does this. He can go to Harbin and take the trans-Siberian train or sojourn there unharmed. The money and the carriages are probably the greatest danger he will encounter. Every filthy ten-kopeck note—patched and repatched—carries the seeds of ten thousand deaths, every broken-down droshky twenty thousand. After the money and the droshkies, the traffic police are the next danger. A Chinese traffic policeman, when he is borne down upon by several cars, generally brandishes his arms and invites all, indiscriminately, to dash in all directions at once. A hospitable gesture—whether rooted in paralysis or politeness—but hardly safe. If one escapes the money and the traffic cops he runs no special risk of being sandbagged—that is, no more than in Chicago—or of having his furniture moved, more, than in Long Island. In brief, he is safe unless he be very poor or very rich. If he is either of these he has special attention from the police.

The worst crime in Harbin is poverty. Out of a population of eighty thousand Russians, a large percentage are emigres who flooded over the Urals during the Revolution, sleeping four deep on the floor of the Siberian stations, leaving their dead unburied as they fled, and now clinging to life in the back streets of Harbin in a state little short of debasement. Over these the Chinese police keep a heavy hand. Many must beg for a living, but the police permit them to beg only on one day a week; then they go from shop to shop, receiving a penny or so at each door. Many poor in Harbin never appear until after nightfall and then only on the deserted back streets. All live in the daily terror of either being sent back to Russia or shunted farther into China.

But poverty is not the only way to attract police attention. The rich also receive their share. Whenever the police need money—and when do the police not need money ?—a victim is selected, either Chinese or Russian, and golddigging begins. Sometimes legal means are used, and the “prospect’, is arrested for some heinous offense, such as appearing in a hat or buttoning his coat, and he is dragged to the police yamen. But often the refined circumlocutions of legal means are omitted as tedious, and he is simply kidnapped. Every rich Russian or Chinese anticipates falling into the hands of the police once or twice a year. One victim in Harbin is said to have already yielded two hundred thousand dollars in ransom money. The victims pay as they do in Shanghai, where kidnappings are frequent, and so perfect is the police system that they never discuss their treatment. Yes, cleanliness, law and order, and a good police system prevail—the cleanliness, order, and police of the East.

The Soviet have surrendered Harbin to the Chinese. There is no apparent friction over the city administration. With far-reaching schemes in the Orient, Moscow can well afford to let the Chinese rule Harbin so long as she does not lose her hold on that greater prize which is the key not only to Harbin but to all north Manchuria—the Chinese Eastern Railway. This, and not city administration, is the matter of first importance. Thanks to its exorbitant freight rates on parts of the line where there is no competition, the Chinese Eastern Railway makes stupendous profits. Twenty-eight million rubles were recently divided by the Dalbank, half to the treasure chest of Stalin and half to that of Chang Tso Lin (then alive). The money melts away like sugar in the Sungari but there is always more to come. This division of spoils and the lynx-eyed necessity of watching each other to see that neither encroaches on the control of the railway very comfortably occupies the Chinese and Russian Machiavellis. But underneath this official status quo, the relation of the two races en masse is a gruelling drama: persecution and abuse from the Chinese, fear and humiliation on the part of the Russians. Under Chinese rule, the man without a country is seen at his worst.

The White Men’s Loss of Prestige

Two things are responsible for the loss of prestige of the white race: one is the fact that the white man now does manual labor; the other is the increasing number of Chinese-Russian marriages. Perhaps, after all, the most significant sight of the Orient is not a Chinese policeman striking a white driver. Perhaps it is a little ragged Russian girl with bare feet, her kerchief tied over her fair hair, washing windows in a Chinese house. For the first time in the history of the East white men work as coolies. Russian and Chinese porters together meet the trains. Russian and Chinese waiters serve together in hotels. Russian and Chinese longshoremen load and unload the steamers. The Chinese has never read William Morris or Ruskin. He knows nothing of the “dignity of labor.” He himself never works when he need not. He cultivates peonies or goes in for cricket-fighting or something that makes life worth while. Ever since the first voyager first landed on these shores of limitless coolie labor the unwritten law has been the white shall do no labor with his hands. Now that the Oriental has seen the white man bent under loads of bean cake, the white has lost something he can never regain.

The second factor—both cause and effect of Chinese ascendancy—is that growing number of streets in Harbin given over to Russian women married to Chinese men. There have always been marriages between Orientals and whites since the first clipper ships landed on these shores without women in their holds. One of the pictures of Hongkong and Shanghai or Kobe has been the blond-bearded Viking striding along the street, his lily-footed wife toddling in his wake at a respectful distance. In the old days of the China Coast, however, it was the Occidental man who married or kept the Oriental woman. A reverse order was a coast scandal. But the world now is full of reversals. Every modern war lord buys not only aeroplanes and alarm clocks from the West, but adds a few white wives to his harem as zakouska. And not only the war lords add Russian women to their menages, but among the poorer classes there are many marriages.

Since women are the home-makers, the families thus constituted live as whites—as slip-shod whites, for the marriages are usually among the very low classes. But in the physiognomy of the children Chinese blood dominates, as it always dominates the less well-established germ cell of the white. The effect upon the Chinese and Russians themselves involved in such a union is lowering rather than otherwise. In close contact with the Russian, the Chinese always loses something difficult to define but easily recognizable —perhaps an inner harmony, the heritage of the oldest civilization in the world. The white women who thus marry seem to lose caste. The prestige of the white race is still sufficient for that. At least they form a society of their own and keep to themselves in company with the other white women who have married Chinese. At first impression it seems a curious rather than encouraging experiment of nature. Perhaps it is her first foreshadowing of her uncaring way of solving the race problem. Stranger things have occurred in her vast melting pot.

Certain it is that certain chemicals are exploding into new forms in the Orient. It would take a very astute intelligence indeed to analyze this changing psychology of Asia and the deep bases of it. One group of foreigners talks of the “inferiority complex.” To them, the Chinese and Japanese have long been inflicted with an inferiority complex thrust upon them by the guns and commerce of the West, and are now revenging themselves. Another group talks of the “superiority complex.” It holds that the Chinese have always known their rape and civilization to be superior, have held the West in contempt, and arc determined to seize and hold their own.

Whatever the basic psychology, the result seems to be the same. China is awakening and awakening arrogantly. Soviet propaganda, the mastership in Harbin, white men and yellows working together as coolies, the fresh accessibility of white women—all have left their mark on the Chinese mind. There are many other contributory factors too complex to analyze, but the main factor lies in that flood of Russian emigres flooding over the Urals who now tread so warily with the Chinese. This moment the Chinese saw the first Russian standing on the street and selling matches the status of the white world changed. And the day the first ragged Russian went to drudge in a Chinese house was more important than the signing of the Versailles treaty. For on that day the constellations of East and West shifted in the heavens.

With what result have the constellations shifted? Is China awakening to assume her obligations or only to make demands? Does the Harbin experiment mean new potentialities in the race—strength, honesty, efficiency ? (Every one of these is a volume in itself in China.) In this remote north is a new type developing which augurs well for the solution of national problems? Those who know China best are the slowest to answer. Only time can tell.

Certainly here in the north is a freer atmosphere. For years Manchuria, containing Harbin and Mukden, has been Chang Tso-lin’s special province—his source of revenue and the sanctuary to which he fled when hard pressed south of the Great Wall. He has drained it regularly and ruthlessly. In spite of all this drain, however, it has prospered. Lying serenely to the north, cut off by the Great Wall, by Chang Tso-lin’s armies, it has escaped the fever with which the rival war lords have kept China seething. Here, if anywhere in China, there seems the possibility of a new type with a clearer head and a stronger will.

And a good type does seem to have shown on the horizon : remarkably keen and intelligent in business, quick to grasp an alien language even as difficult as the Russian, shrewd in everything except the principles of government. It is the science of government that he must learn if he is to pull his great kingdom there to the south together and gain the confidence of the West. Not through theoretical schemes of government on paper—a million here for a power plant, a million there for radio when his treasury would not yield a copper cent if scraped—can he demonstrate his greatness but through the thing at hand : less arrogance and less abuse of the peoples over whom he has authority.

Ill

The Russians would, perhaps, feel more keenly the humiliation of being ruled by Chinese were they any other race than Russian and if their own world were not so laden with drama. Harbin is like one of these boxes one takes apart, finding always another inside. Within the drama of the yellow and the white there is another drama of the Red and White. The officials of the Chinese Eastern Railway represent Moscow, and whoever controls the Chinese Eastern Railway controls Harbin. But in population, Harbin is White Russian, the stand of the Old Regime.

There lies the rub and it is a hard rub. Go into a Chinese hairdresser's and a woman comes in straight from the Rue de la Paix. Attend an official dinner and you dine with Stalin. In Russia, the Old Regime has ceased to exist in sufficient numbers to affect the scene. In Harbin they sit side by side, with no other nation to obscure the type. The Chinese Eastern Railway dispenses its stupendous profits with a gesture of true Russian magnificence. It has built a smart railway club with a delicious cuisine, charming gardens, an opera. Last year it spent three hundred thousand dollars on the opera, with artists out from Leningrad and Moscow. At these playgrounds of the railway Red and White mingle. At one table in the gardens a group of the Old Regime—the women marked by their thin faces and fragile skulls, the men in well-cut clothes—are watching the sunset over the Sungari. At the next table is the shaven head and thick neck of a good Siberian bourgeois, tucking away a Gargantuan Russian meal: he wears a Russian shirt, his boots smell of oil. He is probably a profiteer in furs; the woman with him wears a pink silk blouse and many bangles. A few Chinese faces here and there give the scene the strange flavor of the Ear East and the Far North. But mainly the scene is Russian: Russia old and mellow; Russia new and masterful. The railway—that great power which sustains, overshadows, and rules Harbin—is their common meeting ground. But there the line is drawn.

Magnificence and Squalor

Here and there in the city are evidences of the gigantic contest: not bullet holes and wrecked houses but, none the less, evidence. Take a motor and rattle over the ill-paved roads to Old Harbin. There you will come upon a chapter redolent of the past: a little collection of one-storied houses, the dirt roads winding like cow paths. It was the outpost of the Trans-Siberian when Russia was an adventurous empire striding toward China and the sea with her advance guard of Cossacks. At the end of a road, overhung with trees, is one of the strangest bits of mosaic in the East, a white-pillared house of old Russian style, built privately for the head of the Trans-Siberian Railway when his state approached that of Viceroy of this wild country. Vast rooms, polished floors, a park where the nightingales of Turgenev might have sung— all at the end of the cow paths. It is unconfiscated because it stands on Chinese territory, but even in Harbin it is unique. All the other big houses are occupied by the Soviet, the former inhabitants eking out an existence as best they may—by selling milk and eggs, by being janitors. At least one new palace has been built on railway ground by the Soviet, and in both Old and New Harbin are Soviet parks, beautifully kept and open to the public—reminders of the new masters of the old land.

Why, one asks, does the Old Regime cling to this straggling frontier town at the top of the world, administered by Chinese and Reds and so full of tragedy? They cling here because pride dies hard; because, although poor, here they keep something of their identity; because they dread to be lost in the vortex of the West. For certain numbers the Chinese East offers a livelihood, though it is always haunted by fear.

The Soviet permits the White Russians to hold positions on the railway provided they have Soviet passports. Since in the beginning technically trained men were scarce, the pay-roll contained a large number of men who were not Red at heart. Moscow has not found this agreeable and has been recently trying to replace them with Red disciples. This was all the opening necessary for the Chinese who, taking advantage of the Mukden agreement, that there should be an equal number of Chinese with Russians—the number now being somewhat less—laid claim to the posts here. The result has been an interlude in the Whites’ terror of dismissal, though a temporary one. Those who have any means of livelihood at all are fortunate. Most of the Old Regime Russians stay in Harbin because they are too poor to move.

The Russian heart does not harbor bitterness, but with the drama so recent, the atmosphere resembles that of our Southern border states after the Civil War. There is much propaganda still in Harbin, the money coming in from Europe; and where there is such propaganda there is bitterness. The customs could tell a strange tale of the wares that cross their counters: jewels in quantities wrenched from their settings so that they may not be recognized, silver cigarette cases marked with a crown, the coffee cups of a Grand Duke. But who is there to buy? The Whites cannot and will not. The Reds need not, it is said. In this connection an authentic story is told in Harbin, names and dates of which can be supplied. The wife of a well-known Bolshevik official, wearing a valuable sable coat, was stopped on the street one day by a woman, her shoes almost worn through. “Madam,” said the shabby woman, “will you come with me to the police station? That is my coat.” The wearer protested, but was compelled to go. "There is name and date written on every skin of that coat,” the shabby woman informed the police. “If the coat is hers she will know what they are.” The wearer was unable to say what was written on the sables. The woman with the ragged shoes then gave a name and date. The coat was ripped open and the name and date were found as stated.

“ The most pathetic pawns in the game are the girls thrown on the market. Whenever there is a break in the economic life of a nation it is always the women who are cheapened first. Never before has jt occurred in such appalling proportions as in Russia. Shanghai is flooded with Russian girls who constitute much of the night life in that bizarre hybrid; not all are to be bought, but many are predatory to such an extent that it has been the subject of open debate in the Shanghai papers. In Harbin the life of man—especially of a bachelor with more than a sixpence in his pocket—is either a South Sea paradise or a case of St. Anthony, according to the temperament. When a bachelor moves into the quarters belonging to the customs or posts or one of the big business firms he usually finds a girl already established. She goes with the house like the furniture, and it takes more than a slant-eyed policeman to eject her. She does not appear at his parties but keeps discreetly hidden. Marriages have not been unknown, however, and any American woman with a fiance in Harbin is warned to take the first steamer thitherward. “Ladies must live,” and so must superfluous bits of froth on the stream of life.

A City of Tragic Contrasts

Harbin, essence of tragic contrasts: of East and West, of old and new, of poverty and riches, the "City ‘of Nechevo.” And yet wherever are Russians there is life, and Harbin at night puts on a mask of hectic gaiety. There are ten cabarets which begin activity about midnight—tinsel affairs but clever and amusing. The cabarets are both expensive and cheap. The young “China millionaire” up from the interior with hungry eyes and his year’s salary burning his monkey jacket can buy champagne, probably also the red-haired girl in green spangles with whom he dances, if he chooses. The artists are presumably sans reproche, but the girls who dance are in that borderland which adds piquancy to the geisha. The young China millionaire may spend his whole salary if he likes. But paterfamilias may also take the whole family for a dollar a head.

The cabaret is seldom vulgar, never abandoned. Sometimes there is a moment that touches the heart. Someone sings a gypsy song, the lights go lower. Out of the shadows seems to flow the deep river of the past, winding like a broad ribbon of memory; ahead stretches the misty, unknown future. One feels the Russian soul voyaging about on the bitter plain of experience; no longer friend and foe, the struggle against poverty, against exile, the struggle against yellow and against one another forgotten—all touched into a common race by memory. The moment passes. The lights blare on. A troupe climbs down swinging ladders, clad in powder and paint. Harbin, the “City of Nechevo.”

While inside the city drama within drama unfolds—the drama of power on one hand against fear on the other outside, Manchuria herself, twice as big as Germany, prepares the next battlefield of the world. One line of battalions already moves across the horizon. Through the gates of Harbin themselves flows a constant stream of blue: Chinese coolies who   have fled famine-stricken, tax-ridden Shantung and Chihli pour hungrily over the empty brown plains. Through the break in the Great Wall and the ports they swarm, two million this year and millions more in the loins of these. They bring their wives and children with them, even now and then an aged father across a stalwart back. They carry bedding rolls and bundles that contain all they own in this world, some of them carry a hoe. The sunshine pours down into the plains, warm and golden; the flags hang limp in the air. The scene looks serene and peaceful and remote from wars. No enemy is in sight. Where are the antagonists?    

One sits in Tokio: a small dapper gentleman who in his leisure has a passion for jade and gardens. The other sits in the Kremlin: a stoutish person in a peasant shirt. One holds the key of the South Manchurian Railway, the other of the Chinese Eastern Railway and the Trans-Siberian. Both look with disappointed eyes at Manchuria. The figure in Tokio long ago had a dream: it was a dream of the rich stream of life, but pouring in from his own islands across the way. He has resigned it sorrowfully but finally; he knows now that the Japanese farmer cannot compete with that blue-clad figure with the grass-and-mud cake tucked in his coat. The peasant in Moscow—only he was not a peasant then hut a suave gentleman in a frock coat—also once had a dream: it was of a great Slav empire with free outlets to the sea. That also has passed. Manchuria will be Chinese: only an act of God can stop that now. But the control of that output, the sovereignty over this rich virgin land? Who holds the key to that?

If the shield of Manchuria were drawn, it should be three figures couchant: the bear, and two dragons—a white and two yellows. A battle of railways and ports fought for the last west. Each has her weakness and her own strength. Against Japan works the innate distrust felt for her by China and by Russia; for her, endless cleverness, her militant vigilance and her determination to keep the “special position" which she avers she won in the Russo-Japanese war, and which she states she will bold at the point of the sword. Against China is her chaos and her lack of organized resources; vastly in her favor, the mighty mass of twenty million coolies already on the laud. The bear is probably the weakest of the three. Against him stands lost prestige in the Far East and complex internal problems. For him, ten years of experience which has developed some of the cleverest brains in the world, and the fact that as an ally or enemy Russia is the immediate giant of the future.

What happens in Manchuria will carry results for the whole world. It would be interesting to open one’s eyes in Harbin a hundred years from now and gaze at the seats of power. White or yellow? And if yellow—which?