Action Remote

The 13 Powers represented on the recent Chinese Extraterritoriality Conference at Peking simultaneously released last week the report of their delegates. This weighty document repeated in emphatic form facts known to everyone who knows anything about modern China. It added a program of "recommendations" for necessarily remote action.

China has no government properly speaking but is the spoil of military adventurers who march and countermarch up and down tha land in a conglomerate civil war. Noteworthy, this state of affairs makes it impossible for the Powers to abandon the safeguarding of their citizens in China by the principle of extraterritoriality under which foreigners are tried before courts of their own nationals set up in China.

The Powers recommended to the Government of China that if and when it shall come into existence it should draw up a civil and commercial code and modernize the Chinese judicial procedure. The Powers intimated that if and when this shall be accomplished they would consider gradual abandonment of extraterritoriality.

Mr. Wang Chung-Hui, Yale graduate, subscribed, with reservations, to the report of the Commission which was chairmaned by the U. S. delegate, Silas Hardy Strawn, graduate of the high school at Ottawa, Ill., potent Chicago lawyer and counselor of industry.