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Updated: May 1, 2025
There is some reason to think that, at the beginning of the Washington Conference, an attempt was made by the consortium banks, with the connivance of the British but not of the American Government, to establish, by means of the Conference, some measure of international control over China.
The old Roman digest interprets nature with philosophic accuracy when it describes marriage as "Conjunctio maris et feminae et consortium omnis vitae, divini et humani juris communicatio". "The union of man and woman and the companionship of all life, the sharing of right, human and divine."
I do not pretend that the evidence against the consortium is conclusive, and I have not space here to set it all forth. But to any European radical Mr. Lamont's statement that the consortium does not want control reads like a contradiction in terms.
I have previously stated my own belief that our State Department proposed the Consortium primarily for political ends, as a means of checking the policy pursued by Japan of making unproductive loans to China in return for which she was getting an immediate grip on China's natural resources and preparing the way for direct administrative and financial control when the day of reckoning and foreclosure should finally come.
All of the British newspapers in China lauded the wise action of the Chambers. At the same time, Mr. Lamont was in Peking, and was setting forth that the object of the Consortium was the abolition of further concessions, and the uniting of the financial resources of the banks in the Consortium for the economic development of China itself.
There are radicals abroad and at home who think that our entrance into a Consortium already proves that we have entered upon the road of reversal and who naturally see in the Pacific Conference the next logical step.
Temporarily there is a fourth possibility, namely that a consortium of Japan and the White Powers may control China; but I do not believe that, in the long run, the Japanese will be able to co-operate with England and America. In the long run, I believe that Japan must dominate the Far East or go under.
Unfortunately, the "Consortium," for joint commercial enterprises of French and Germans in Morocco and the French Congo, broke down on points of detail; and this produced a very sore feeling in Germany in the spring of 1911. The Kaiser saw in that move, and a corresponding advance of Spanish troops in the North, a design to partition Morocco.
If we had not lost the war a fight to the death with the Magyars would have been inevitable, because it is impossible to conceive that any sensible European consortium would consent to be brought into partnership with Magyar aspirations and plans for dominion. But, of course, during the war an open fight with Budapest was impossible.
Two important points had, however, been attained; first, China was kept financially afloat during the year 1912 by the independence of a single member of the London Stock Exchange; secondly, using this coup as a lever the Peking Government secured better terms than otherwise would have been possible from the official consortium. Meanwhile the general internal situation remained deplorable.
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