The Washington correspondent of the Times made a strange and
unexpected announcement on Tuesday about the Tariff Conference in China. He said that the American Government was prepared, if agreement on concurrent action of a most liberal kind could not be secured among the Powers at the Conference, to act " independently and immediately " in revising the American Commercial Treaty arrangements with China. We confess that we are surprised by this, and we can hardly doubt that it will be explained that whatever words have been used by the American Government, or by its representative in China, were not intended to mean what the Times correspondent tells us they literally do mean. It would not, of course, be unfair if America, whose liberal policy towards China has long been well known, finding that she could not drag the other Powers with her far enough along the path of liberality, decided later that she must act alone. We should, indeed, applaud her if she did.
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