Editorial
In Sheep's Clothing.

We must be pardoned if we were really beginning' to think American humour had died with Mark Twain. We were unaware, until a month ago, of the existence of Senator Guy D. Goff. We apologise, and we feel certain that the Senator will be great-minded enough to forgive us.

An unparalleled sense of humour, it must be remarked, is only one of the Senator's many gifts—is indeed but the crowning lustre of a nature blessed with extraordinary political, economic, and psychological vision. These remarkable faculties found cry stallised expression in an interview with the representative of a leading local paper, in which there appeared, on August 17th, over two columns in the Senator's best style.

Our noted visitor, it seems, enjoyed, not so long ago, a weekend holiday on the Chinese coast, and during that period he made an exhaustive study of the complex economic situation of the whole country—a situation which has baffled not a few noteworthy economists after years of patient investigation. Great were the pangs of Christian grief that pierced the Senator's heart when he discovered the deplorable condition of the Chinese people. Under the guiding hand, or rather paw, of the savage Russian bear, they had reverted to barbarism—become totally uncivilized; cow-boy movies, revival meetings, and chewing-gum were actually quite unknown amongst them. The Senator was page 2 not the man to restrain the hand of sympathy until the last possible moment. His ethical code was one of opportunism. He clearly saw that after a considerable number of months of turmoil the Chinese had not yet completely solved their internal problems, and he realized that the hour was come for fatherly, brotherly, and otherly assistance. The one solution to the urgent economic and political enigma presented by the Chinese situation was to be found in a purely moral step, which he called upon the English-speaking nations, as in duty bound, to take.

The Senator gives a characteristic description of the Chinese nature. "The people of China," he tells us, "are content to meditate and reflect, and find enlightenment in what the Western world would classify only as mental darkness.....The overwhelming majority of them are helpless, fatuous, and hopeless. They are a nation of four hundred million people and ninety-eight per cent, of them are illiterate." This is the unhappy race which, the Senator proposes, should be saved from itself—saved by America and England. We would respectfully remind him, in passing, that an American professor of Psychology recently announced that the average American citizen has the mentality of a child of fifteen. It is, of course, a mighty tribute to the unselfishness of the Senator's nature that he insists that the blind, out of compassion for their fellow-sufferers, should lead the blind.

"The Chinese people," he remarks, "are susceptible. They are intensely sensitive to suggestion. As a people they have neither gratitude nor the sense of forgiveness." With an inspirational flash of wit he goes on to tell us that when passion and anger hold their sway, both the graciousness and the gratitude—which he has just asserted are not possessed at all by the Chinese—"lose all sense of memory."

For a moment the Senator drops the thread of his humour and adds a delicate children's fairy-tale touch, when, in ascribing these terrible conditions to Russian influence, he says, "Russia to-day is training her citizens to be prowling beasts, ready to devour all who may cross their track."

But you cannot long prevent the native wit of the Senator from bubbling up in its translucent fulness. "Young China," he continues, "as expressed in the student movement, is destroying the mental balance of the people"—the joke of course being that he has just definitely shown that the Chinese people haven't any such thing as a mental balance!

The Senator carries his little joke to a sparkling climax when he tells us that the ignorant, illiterate, and weak-minded Chinese, along with the Bolsheviks, have "agreed in singling out England for attack. They appreciated that it would be a mistake to attack all the Powers at once (!), and in their Oriental astuteness, they realized that in attacking one Power they would receive a certain measure of benevolent neutrality from certain of the other Powers."

The really inimitable part of the comedy the Senator reserves, with proper dramatic appreciation, for the last paragraph. "China has tried for sixteen years to find a George Washington to lead her out of a wilderness of howling, looting, bribing, grafting chaos, and neither by day nor by night, in an page 3 swer to her pathetic cry, "come over into Macedonia and help us"; there has ever been an answering voice or an echo to her cry. Is China to go on slowly committing national and race suicide? Is civilization doing its duty when it stands placidly by and sees a great people helplessly, hopelessly, and supinely rushing to its ruin? Does civilization answer the test when it does not step in for the sake of humanity and aid those who cannot aid themselves?" A final burst of uncontrollable humour, before the Senator switches over to serious moral business, is contained in his assertion that Great Britain and America, in these direful circumstances, must stand and act together, since they are "interested ethically, morally, religiously, and least of all, commercially"!!!

The solution, says Senator Goff, dropping his gay manner with characteristic versatility, is obvious. It consists in "friendly, immediate, inexpensive intervention." For a few cents, in a few days, with a few handshakes, we can save the world from a future "costly, devastating, horrible war." We are reminded of some of the postal course advertisements that brighten the pages of papers in the Senator's native land.....

Enough! We do not for an instant believe that these sentiments are inspired by the pitying love which the Senator professes to feel for his wretched Chinese brethren, nor even by the lofty contempt which his badly chosen words are unable to conceal. "Scratch the epiderm and you find the derm." Strip the flowers and tears and prayers from the Senator's protestations, and you see them for what they are—piously-disguised propaganda against a nation which lies at a disadvntge, weakly camouflaged excuses for a would-be departure from the professed Anglo-American policy of non-intervention.

We have heard this talk of "friendly, immediate, inexpensive intervention" before, and we know what it implies—an hypocrisy as old as civilization and a good deal older than that which Senator Goff so ably represents. We are constrained to remind him that even if China has not found a George Washington or a Senator Goff to make her crooked paths straight, that is no reason why she should not find a Sun Yat Sen or a Chiang Kai-Shek. It is bad enough that Senator Goff should paint the Chinese national character in such villainously false colours; he might at least refrain from that accusation of hypocrisy implied in his assertion that the Chinese are purposing the destruction of civilization and at the same moment crying out pathetically, "Come over into Macedonia and help us."

What surprises us most is that Senator Goff should consider a nation of fatuous, illiterate, ungracious, and vengeful people worthy of the condescending interest of Western civilization at all. The Senator, we fear, gives himself away when he says that we are interested "least of all, commercially." It is something that he is frank enough to admit that the interests of Britain and America are not solely "moral, ethical, and religious."

If we have any spark of the sentiment of justice in us, if our heart can burn at piously-worded insults, when those insults are directed—from a safe distance—upon peoples other than our own, we will resist with the last grain of our strength the huge page 4 injustice proposed under that pernicious title—"friendly, immediate, inexpensive intervention." If, like Senator Goff, we are going to invoke the name of Justice, let us uphold, not betray her.