793.94/4337
Memorandum by the Secretary of State
The French Ambassador came at my request. I told him I had sent for him in order to ask his advice in reference to what we should do with respect to our protest to Japan on the landing of troops. I said that the situation had changed since the time when he first spoke to me and I had subsequently spoken to him. I said, in the first place, there were peace negotiations going on at Shanghai which seem to have reached an encouraging stage and I allowed him to read Johnson’s telegram of February 17, midnight. After reading it, the Ambassador said it was very encouraging. I said then that, in addition to that, the Japanese election came on Saturday, the twentieth, and I was convinced from the way in which the Tokyo Foreign Office had handled my confidential talk with Debuchi in giving it out to the press that they would play politics over any protest which we might send before election. I, therefore, was inclined to believe that the wisest policy would be to let this matter wait until they could not use it at the election. The Ambassador at once said that he had not known [Page 374] about the election but he was inclined to agree with me and that it would be wiser not to risk disturbing the peace negotiations. I told him that the principal thing that I wished to avoid was any danger of a misunderstanding with France and that if his Government felt that they had gone ahead and relied upon us and been disappointed, I would rather send the message which was lying on my desk authorizing the protest. The Ambassador said that when he telegraphed, after his talk with me, he found his Government had already sent the message on their own initiative, apparently without knowledge of his message. He only regretted that they had made a verbal protest instead of the written one we had suggested. The Ambassador said that modern diplomacy involved juridical matters now and it was necessary to lay a foundation for a lawsuit and now we had no evidence of our protest except these verbal representations—we had no paper which we could show the Chinese in case the question came up between us and them. I said I agreed with him perfectly and that I had been criticized in my own Department for relying too much on verbal representations instead of making a written record at the time. The Ambassador responded that he felt that in these juridical times the old methods of verbal intercourse were getting obsolete in such matters. I said under those circumstances I would hold this matter until after the election.
The Ambassador then referred to an entirely different matter for which a separate memorandum will be written. After this I brought him back to the question of China and asked him whether he had heard any answer from France to my suggestion as to the Nine-Power Treaty. He said he had communicated what I said to his Government but they made no reply. I pointed out to him the reasons why I thought the Nine-Power Treaty would make more impression both upon Japan and China than Article 10 of the League. I said that, in the first place, the Japanese could not say to the Nine-Power Treaty as they were saying to Article 10 that it was not intended to cover China. The Nine-Power Treaty was explicit and referred only to China and it represented a long and deliberate policy. Furthermore, both Japan and China knew that the signatories were not acting in any spirit of altruism if they invoked the Nine-Power Treaty but because they had a direct interest in the Yangtze Valley which they did not wish to have disturbed and Japan would pay more attention to that than to a general treaty based upon a general world policy. In the second place, I thought it would have much more effect upon China and would convince China that we were not siding with Japanese aggression. I felt that this was very necessary to protect our nationals in China. The Ambassador said he realized all this but the difficulty was that both Japan and China had made up their minds that neither [Page 375] we nor the nations of Europe would fight. In the words of the Chinese proverb it was a case of straw guns and snow swords. Therefore he, the Ambassador, feared that when they got together to settle their differences they would settle, both of them, at the expense of us and he reminded me of how he had told me that General Ma up in Manchuria would prove to be a Japanese in Chinese uniform.