Sweet Lagoon

Pith-helmeted Britishers, suckled on the strong wine of an imperial tradition, reared to carry a white man's burden without stooping, made rendezvous at their Hongkong clubs, waited the word of command. A cruiser, a team of gunboats, coaled up in the harbor.

But no word came from Downing Street. Foreign Minister Austen Chamberlain--son of Imperialist Joe*-- was as dumb as the lions in Trafalgar Square.

The Chinese boycott of British shipping had already become surprisingly effective. The impertinence of it was not to be endured. Leaders of the pith-helmeted colony took counsel, called a proper Anglo-Saxon mass meeting, indicted resolutions after the Eton and Oxford manner, monopolized the cables.

They cabled Mr. Austen Chamberlain to remember, and to act.

Had Mr. Chamberlain forgotten that Hongkong--"place of the sweet lagoon"--was the perfect sapphire in Queen Victoria's crown? Where else did such a roadstead curve so lustrously about the skirts of such island hills? This island, 29 square miles, had been England's since 1842, her Pacific Gibraltar, her Pillar of Hercules between the Torrid and the Temperate Zones, her trademark on the map of China.

Did Mr. Chamberlain fully realize that the hysterical semi-Bolshevik Government of Southern China, centring at Canton (on the mainland, 75 miles from Hongkong) had banned all British vessels from its waters, that the docks of Hongkong were completely tied up by a sympathetic strike?

In so doing the Chinese had violated treaties.

Mr. Chamberlain should intervene by force, should, if necessary, occupy "Canton. Otherwise, said the helmeted islanders, where is our British prestige? How shall we be better than a Chinaman?

Other white powers might not cooperate--but when was Britain scared to act alone?

Mr. Chamberlain cabled reply that the Foreign Office had the matter under close scrutiny. The strike, the embargo, continued. And the masters and merchants of the city by the sweet lagoon seemed to see a thumb at every Chinese nose.

-"Think imperially" and "I never like being hit without hitting back" were two characteristic utterances of Birmingham's hero.