"For fourteen years," he burst out, "we have been wanting that piece of land, and asking for it! Asked them for it fourteen years ago! Told them fourteen years ago that we wanted it!
"And what did they do?" he went on irritably. "What did they do but procrastinate, knowing we wanted it! Put us off. Postponed a decision. Practically refused to give it to us, knowing we wanted it! Other things came up in the meantime, so we did not press them, and the matter dropped for a number of years. However, we took it up again in 1914, two years ago. It was the same thing—procrastination: delay; no positive answer. Then we pressed them a little harder. What did they do? Asked for more time to think it over, more time after all these years, knowing we wanted it! Knowing that we had asked for it fourteen years ago, as far back as 1902! Knowing that we had asked for it as far back as 1902, they still had the audacity to ask for more time to think it over!
"However," he resumed, "we gave them more time. They asked for a year. We gave them a year. When the year was up, they asked for six months. We gave them six months. When the six months were up, they asked for three months. We gave them three months. We were most reasonable and patient. When the three months were up, they asked for one month. We had infinite patience. When the one month was up, they asked for two weeks. We gave them two weeks. We had infinite forbearance. Think of it! Naturally, at the end of two weeks, when they still had not made up their minds, we took it. What else could we have done? We had given them every opportunity, for fourteen years. Ah, these Chinese! They are impossible. No one can understand them!"
We are going to leave Peking within a day or two and go down to the tropics for the winter. This is the end of November and it is getting bitterly cold, and with the on-coming of cold weather we seem to have reverted suddenly to our original plan of visiting Angkor. So you will get no more Chinese letters from me until the spring, when we are planning to return to Peking. It has all been most exciting, most interesting, but we are thoroughly tired out with having our sympathies so played upon, so wrought up, and feeling ourselves impotent. It is distressing to stand by and see such things transpire under our very eyes, injustices which we are powerless to prevent. I shall be anxious to know whether anything of this affair has crept into our American papers. I suppose not, however. We are anxious only to see "civilization" triumph in Europe. The backwash of civilization in the Orient is not our concern. All I can say is this: The world would have rung with news of such a grab if Japan had been guilty of it.