Excerpt from Abridged Report of an Address on the "Chinese Puzzle" Delivered by Mr. Arthur Diósy, F. R. G. S., &C., At the Junior Constitutional Club, Piccadilly, on Wednesday, January 16th, 1901

Inches, you will see that some days you only get an eighth of an inch of China. (laughter.) This is a very good barometer by which you are able to judge of the public interest which is being taken in the question. Now, the apathy which at present exists is not highly creditable to the intellect of the masses of this country, but, fortunately, from a practical point of view it has some good features. I Wlll endeavour to make my meaning clear to you I ven ture to think that those would be ill-advised, would be absolutely unpatriotic, who would attempt at the present time to lash up popular feeling into a national agitation over the state of affairs in the Far East. Those would be, I repeat, ill-advised and unpatriotic who would try by agitation at the present moment to coerce Her Majesty's Government into adopting any other attitude towards the question than the one which they have already taken up, because it was the only one which they could possibly take up just now. You must remember, you must know, if you have never heard it before, that the only policy which is likely to prevail in the Far East, the only policy which is understood by the teeming millions of Chinese, is the policy of the fist - mailed or otherwise. (loud laughter.) You must remember that at the present moment the fists of Great Britain are busily engaged, and I fear are already rather sore about the knuckles, in another part of the world, and until those fists are once more free to be used in a part of the world other than South Africa, we cannot help the attitude, the apparently supine attitude, which Great Britain at the present time is assuming in the Far East. But only at the present moment, for when the South African crisis has come to an end - as it assuredly must do some day -when that great problem has been settled once for all, then it will behove us, it. Will behove every patriotic Briton, to see that those fists of Great Britain are put into pickle and hardened, in order that.

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