Lord Lansdowne in the House of Lords . on Tuesday delivered
an important and lengthy speech on China. He thought matters were progressing fairly well there, that the Protocol would soon be signed—the signature has been arrested again for unknown reasons — and that the European forces in China, which recently, num- bered one hundred and fourteen thousand men, of whom eighteen thousand were British, would speedily be reduced to ,eighteen thousand men, of whom four thousand one hundred would be . British. We had carried our point as to the restriction of the tariff to 5 per cent., and our position on the Yangtse was, a good one. We had not, it is true, special privileges there, but Russia had agreed not to interfere with our railway concessions in the Valley, and under the Anglo - German Agreement and a Treaty with China our ships were at liberty to go wherever junks may go. Moreover,. there must in the Valley be no special tariff against us. The agreement that the terri- torial integrity of China shall be maintained does cover Manchuria, Russia only remaining there until order has been restored. He understood that there had been a recrudescence of disorder which would delay Russian evacuation of the province, but "the words. of the Anglo-German Agreement maintaining the territorial condition of China are entirely
unqualified and unlimited," and Manchuria is a province of China.
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