March 18, 1913, the President withdraw from these responsibilities, and from responsibility to the great powers and to China in what we had done, by repudiating the six-power loan which again had placed the world on common ground respecting China.

On receiving this rebuff, the European powers went over to Japan. The arbitrament of the world's most vital affairs was balanced in Manchuria. The alignment of the powers in the World War had been made in China and the Pacific area. The action of the President confirmed them in their alignment. Japan's conquest of the European powers and winning of them to her side was completed.

In three years the European powers which had adhered to a position which we had defended for 129 years, and to which they had been pledged in writing for 12 years, had awarded Shantung and the German North Pacific possessions to Japan, not troubling to inform us of the fact. It was in sequence to events planned by Japan and had been deprecated by English, French, German, and Ru-sian statesmen who desired to support our position instead of that of Japan. It was a conquest over America, it remains so, and the President asks us to ratify it.

As it existed at the beginning of 1913, our reconstructed position in China and the Pacific to meet the movement set up by Japan because of the Portsmouth Treaty was destroyed by the President. War ensued, with demoralization in China through lack of foreign money and through China being obliged to quadruple her borrowings from Japan. And after four years of struggle by China, and the most bitter failure and disappointment, our envoy to China, on his own initiative, but approved by the Government, sent a note of friendly counsel to China in her despair. It was in accord with immemorial right and intercourse with China antedating Japan's civilized relations with China and her civilized place in the world by nearly 100 years. Japan openly re ented the action and protested on the ground of interference in her domain. Open conflict was thereby established by Japan which she, backed by her allies,had kept hidden, even since the President repudiated the six-power loan which had united us.

Two interpretations of the act of our envoy to China exist: One American, one Japanese. They are directly opposed. They established Japan in the cours adoptd aftr the Prsident's repudiation of the six-power loan, namely, in disputing whatever we do in defense of the position against which aJpan opposes her own. And Japan followed her protest with a special mission to America under Ishii to set up her interpretation before her European allies against our own.

Japan did this last in the Ishii-Lansing notes, and to such satisfaction that those allies, after awarding to Japan Shantung and the German North Pacific possessions, confirmed it in their drafts of the peace treaty 18 months later.

Japan's exertions stirred the counsels of the President, which took action intended to meet the consequences of what our envoy to China had done. It was taken on the expressed grounds that "unless we are prepared to oppose Japan, and go on antagonizing her, we must do something constructive.” It had become our policy to try and placate Japan by putting it that way instead of facing the truth.

The reasons given for our action were that "we had to decide whether we would be China's cat's-paw, or get on with Japan."

"We" decided to “ 'get on with Japan." The moral sanction for what was about to be done, forming the principle on which the Ishii-Lansing notes were executed by us, was that China was "corrupt and irresponsible," and was "a festering mass of humanity."

The friendly note of our envoy was handed to China June, 1917. Japan immediately brought up the question of sending Ishii, and his mission was arranged through our embassy in Tokio. As I understand that arrangement, what was to be done was determined in advance. All conversations that were to take place in Washington after Ishii's arrival there were written out. It was decided in advance that the real object of the mission, which was to get recognition from us of Japan's special interests in China, would not be discussed. If it came up the answer to Japan's expectations would be no.

The Department of State confirmed this decision to our embassy in Tokio. Thereupon Ishii stated to our embassy that he would not expect to get reeognition of Japan's special interests in China, and the embassy cabled this renunciation to the Department of State.

Ishii started for Washington and Mr. Morris was invested in Washington as our ambassador to Japan. Morris participated at Washington in the discussions and completion of the coming Ishii-Lansing notes, while Ishii was enroute from Japan. The notes were signed while he was enroute to Tokio and he did not know what they meant until after he had reached Tokio. His knowledge gained in Washington differed diametrically from the knowledge of Europe and east Asia, including our embassy in Tokio which held a conference when it received the notes by cable, to determine what they meant. The conference lasted all night and broke down in total disagreement, Morris on one side and the embassy staff on the other. A decision as to what explanation should be made to the public never was arrived at. After two days Lansing's interpretation came and saved the embassy from having to equivocate about it.

The notes meant the opposite of what our Government, in instructing Morris, said they meant. They achieved the opposite of what our Government purposed. America was discredited before China and the allies. And Japan and America again went on record with interpretations which are diametrically opposed.

The President then undertook personal management at the peace conference of these affairs, whereupon England and France wrote out for Japan their final drafts of the award to Japan of Shantung and the German North Pacific possessions. The President then signed this award, and England, and France, with the co-operation of Italy and the other allies, handed Japan the award with our signature on it. It was the authors of the repudiation of the reconstructive measures in China, and the framers for Ishii in the terms of Japan, of the Lansing notes, who signed this award.

Having taken action on the decision not to be the catspaw of China, we made ourselves the tool of Japan, and through Japan the tool of England, France and the allies.

England and France did not want to be so. In 1913 they had said they were sorry to lose us from the confidence and the counsels of the powers, especially England, whose statesmen said she desired to work with us.

Thus Japan was able in 14 years to destroy our diplomacy. It had been defended respecting China and the Pacific area since 1784. But in 1913 the President opened the way for Japan to finally accomplish its destruction, in these words repudiating the Six-Power Loan, namely:

"The conditions of the loan seem to us to touch very nearly the administrative independence of China itself; and the administration does not feel that it ought, even by implication, to be party to those conditions. The responsibility might go the length of forcible interference in the financial and even the political affairs of that great oriental state. The responsibility is obnoxious to the principles upon which the Government of our people rests." Neither at the time of this statement, nor at any time in our history had the conditions of China's position or intercourse with her, rested on the principles on which the Government of our people rests. And they rested on not less than 46 treaties fixing China's position and fate as we had written them in accordance with the demands of Europe and the allies of the time, since at least 1784, and could not be affected except for evil by this act. China's position in the world was first explicitly and definitely fixed by the American treaty of 1844. The terms of this treaty were the best obtainable at the time, but their supreme law was extraterritoriality under which China became deprived of independence in everything connected with foreign intercourse. As these terms were the terms of all nations and were copied and expanded in all treaties and conventions, this made China's place that of a prisoner whose indefinite period of sentence we had formulated.

After 55 years John Hay reformulated the terms of China's place so as to secure to her a way to emerge from her prison. All nations accepted the formula, which was the open-door doctrine, and wrote it in subsequent treaties and conventions respecting China.

We thus raised into international being a policy consciously and unconsciously pursued and practiced by us in principle since 1784, and recognized in writing by the world since 1899-1900. It was thus our first great foreign doctrine, and in this sense is older than the Monroe doctrine. The circumstances of its origin, and the civilization and situation to which it refers are older, and the problem to which it refers is older.

In 1909 we devised new formulas to safeguard China's way out of her prison and to secure her escape from the sentence which we had written.

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They were accepted by the powers. But in the work of six years, regardless of the aversion the President expressed to even forcible interference in China's affairs, he signed in the Shantung award, the rending of China and destruction of all we had done to preserve our position.

Up to 1913 the powers were with us. When the President rebuffed those powers by repudiating the instrument by which they had again finally joined with us, he sent new envoys to represent us in China and Japan.

Our envoy to Tokio was Mr. Guthrie. He reached there the middle of the year and began the search for a book that would explain the questions of the region which was the strangest he had ever seen. He looked for "a small book, not a large one," because, as he continued, he was "too old to read a large one."

Four years later he died while still searching for that book, and his body was tenderly borne back to us by a people which venerated his personal greatness, as well as the simplicity and innocence which had made him the unconscious dupe of such a tragic gaucherie.

Our envoy to China was Mr. Reinsch. After six years of cross purposes. blunders which never have been exposed because too disgraceful to investigate during a state of war; and after insufferable insult and humiliation, failure, defeat, and madness, he has resigned.

Both these men were appointed after the act by which our destructive policy became known, and they went on fools' errands. Their survivor is Ambassador Morris, at Tokio, on whom all East Asia, including China, Japan, Korea, and Siberia, is saddled, and who ranges from the Pacific to Central Asia and Europe. Mr. Guthrie left him no book, and he has been for two years heroically struggling under the misunderstanding with which the Government blinded him when he set out from Washington. He, too, is overwhelmed with the defeat and is trying to extricate himself from the madness and ruin.

The only refuge for a country which has enacted such a debacle as I have described, and intends to complete it by compelling the ratification of that debacle by its great Senate, is a league of other nations who can manage its affairs better than it can manage them. If in one single instance, the Shantung award, the peace treaty is ratified by the Senate of the United States, two principal things will result: First will come our elimination from East Asia through abandonment of our place in the world for an elusive status promised us, and second, there will take place the rending of the vast race unit which is the body of Asiatic civilization, and the setting of it adrift in the Pacific area and the world, engined by Japan.

Our position in the world differs from that of the rest of civilization. It is comparable only to the position which, as pretender to leadership of an opposing civilization, Japan, marshalling Europe against us, usurps and holds by force. Therefore we cannot enter the peace treaty, in my opinion, or the league of nations, on the same terms as the powers of Europe. To do so would destroy our place in the world. We have to enter them, if at all, on terms that will defend us as the leader and the head and front of western civilization moving across the Pacific Ocean, and defend all interests intrusted to us by western civilization and by Asiatic civilization, of which China is the body.

The considerations which I have respectfully submitted concern only our international entity and what we are in the world by circumstances over which we have no control, which, if surrendered, would complete the work of destruction which Japan openly began, with every confidence of success, in 1905. The head of the column of western civilization, receiving the impact and hitherto sustaining the pressure of aggressive and predatory Asiatic civilization, would be crushed. And there would be no occasion to invoice our physical assets in East Asia gone down, or of our moral and cultural influences which are greater than those of any other power. After the destruction of our moral position, there is but one end. And in it civilization will share.

The CHAIRMAN. We will adjourn at this point until to-morrow. (Thereupon, at 12 o'clock noon, the committee adjourned until 10 o'clock a. m., Thursday, September 4, 1919.)

THURSDAY, SEPTEMBER 4, 1919.

UNITED STATES SENATE, COMMITTEE ON FOREIGN RELATIONS, Washington, D. C. The committee met pursuant to adjournment, at 10 o'clock a. m., in room 426, Senate Office Building, Senator Henry Cabot Lodge presiding.

Present: Senators Lodge (chairman), Brandegee, Knox, Harding, Moses, Swanson, and Pomerene.

There appeared before the committee the following delegation representing the Jugo-Slav Republican Alliance of the United States: Mr. Etbin Kristan, chairman; Mr. Frank Kerze, Mr. Philip Godina, Mr. Lazarovich-Hrebelianovich, Mr. R. F. Hlacha, Mr. Josif Michailovitch, and A. H. Skubic, secretary.

The CHAIRMAN. Gentlemen, our time is limited. I had hoped that you would get here to begin at 10 o'clock, but we can give you from now until 12 o'clock. You must divide the time between yourselves as you think best.

STATEMENT OF MR. ETBIN KRISTAN, OF CHICAGO, ILL.

Senator BRANDEGEE. Let me ask you, have you arranged now about the division of your time? How long do you want to talk? Mr. KRISTAN. It will take about 20 minutes.

The CHAIRMAN. Very well; proceed.

Mr. KRISTAN. Gentlemen, the delegation of the Jugo-Slav Republican Alliance takes the liberty to express its deep gratitude for the privilege of a hearing before this honorable body, and for the permission to lay before it the aspirations of the Jugo-Slavs regarding the regulation of the boundaries of this new State, and based upon, what we consider, the right of our race.

Gentlemen, the Jugo-Slav State, called also the State of the Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes is a new formation and a product of this great war which has removed many obstacles obstructing the unification of the southern Slavs. The idea of unity lived in their souls for ages, and, long before this war, great men of our Nation sacrificed their best for the promotion of this idea, the realization of which is the inevitable condition for our existence and for a more successful progress.

The greatest barrier to the unification of the Jugo-Slavs was the former Austro-Hungarian monarchy, under whose democratic rule the majority of all the three branches of Jugo-Slavs was subdued, and whose policy tended to subject under her rule the remaining inde

pendent Jugo-Slavs of Serbia and Montenegro. For the Jugo-Slavs the collapse of the Austrian autocracy was imperative to attain conditions for establishing their own home, and for this very reason the Jugo-Slavs stood, since the first day of the world conflagration against their oppressor and extortioner, offering supreme sacrifices for their cause, which was also the cause of the Allies and their associated nations. Numerous documents prove that Austria was conscious of the sentiments of the Slovenes, Croats, and Serbs, who were persecuted and oppressed with all means of autocratic brutality; who were forcibly driven out of their homes, held behind prison bars, and silenced by bullets and rope. To-day it is also a proven fact that the power of the Hapsburg dynasty and her servile government, as well as the power and might of the Austrian militarism, was shattered chiefly by the stubborn resistance of the Jugo-Slavs and other oppressed nations.

Now the war is over and a new map of Europe is in making. This work of readjustment filled the Jugo-Slavs with hope for a just solution of their nationa! question; the strongest guaranty therefor they saw in the famous declarations of the President of the United States of America, regarding the war aims of our great American nation. There is not a single word in those speeches and proclamations, which the Jugo-Slays had not enthusiastically approved of, and if the peace were concluded according to those principles, all the national aspirations of the Jugo-Slavs would have been fulfilled.

It is extremely regretful that the actual solution of the European and world questions falls short of the ideal, especially where the Jugo-Slavs were the most concerned, the Paris peace conference did not place itself on a basis of justice, but often rather listened to arguments which truly democratic elements thought were destroyed in the blast of the world conflagration and their ashes buried forever. For a long period Europe was troubled with racial questions, retarding her progress in other fields; Austria especially was a warning example of a community, wherein reaction lived on kindling nationalistic passions. Everyone familiar with Europe, especially with the Near East and central Europe, had to consider the solution of the problems of nationality as one of the most important questions, especially the question of readjustment; because, by doing so, the most serious obstacle to the successful efforts of the nations would be removed from the field of political, economical, and cultural life. Unfortunately this aim is not being considered, but, on the contrary, many decisions were made which do not eliminate those complications, but rather increase them, to the detriment of the nations in their interior life and to the detriment of better international relations.

The disregard of the ethnological principle, the importance of which is immense all over Europe, is especially obvious in the decision regarding the frontiers of the Jugo-Slav State. On the boundaries between Jugo-Slavs and Magyars in former Hungary, and on the boundaries between Jugo-Slavs and Germans in former Austria, especially in Carinthia, the former have been wronged, and there is an undercurrent striving at still more reducing their national territory. At this moment there are many other unsettled questions concerning Jugo-Slav territory. But visible signs point to a great danger for the Jugo-Slavs along the Adriatic littoral, where the vital interests of the nation are at stake. Italy bases her claim on the