Impotent Diplomats

The Diplomatic Corps in Peking held a conference. The object was to ask the Chinese Foreign Office to provide a police force for the railways. The conferring diplomats held such widely divergent views that no representations are to be made to the Chinese Government. The main difficulty was that of finance--which was bound up in the creation of a police force. It appears that the Chinese were willing to form such a body, providing the necessary funds were taken out of the railway revenues. As the railway companies have already defaulted on foreign debts, this scheme was not acceptable to the diplomatic representatives of Foreign Powers.