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the Chinese procession had passed peacefully at first, headed by school children and by representatives of the various guilds, with nothing save banners, declaring their unity with their fellow citizens against the Westerner. Then there had come a group of soldiers with guns, who presented arms quite harmlessly. Then suddenly from behind them the first shots were fired toward Shameen, followed by a volley from the soldiers - and the battle was started. We learned that three bullets had struck the wall beside the chair of an American woman we knew as she sat on the verandah of the Victoria Hotel, but that she had escaped uninjured; that one of the men who lunched with us had been shot through the leg below the knee; and that an elderly Frenchman, much beloved, had been instantly killed while walking near the Catholic church. The marines on the Ashville got ready for action and fretted to be off. On the decks of two Japanese battleships we could see other restless marines eager for the order to go ashore. Then word came that it was over and no naval help was needed. About seven o'clock we were told to go on shore in the naval launches provided and pack small bags to take with us to Hongkong. We were not asked whether or not we wanted to go to Hongkong; we were simply told that we should be conveyed there by naval escort.

The island was in complete darkness. I groped my way into my house and got out candles. Then I busied myself putting out supplies of matches, food, and towels. At last my husband came in. He told me that I should have to obey the order to go to Hongkong, as Shameen was to be completely evacuated of women and children, and he urged me to return to my home in the States until the trouble was over.

Hongkong was full to overflowing

with Western refugees from all over South China. Women from Swatow repeated tales of atrocities and of starvation by boycott. People from interior towns told of mob cruelty and long treks across country to river boats; of red pamphlets inciting the natives to drive out the 'Imperialistic Devil,' which came in advance of every instance of hostility.

A friend had taken us into her house. My child was happy in the nursery. My two servants were fitted into the household and given work. I had long, idle hours in which to do nothing but listen to wild talk. Soviet Russia was blamed for the situation. Days passed; the Governments took no action.

People began to say we were forgotten. Inconvenienced by the Hongkong servants' strike, the shipping boycott, the fear of financial ruin, the crowded discomfort of the city, they found it hard to understand that local action might only start a world war which would destroy civilization.

Telegraph lines to Canton were cut. Mails were interrupted. Only an occasional naval boat ran up the river carrying food supplies. I knew that in Canton my husband, an official under the Chinese Government at Peking, though an Englishman, would be going into the city every day, maintaining an attitude of absolute neutrality.

Unable to leave for the United States in contentment, and still more unable to stand the idle uncertainty in Hongkong, I boarded a native Chinese boat one afternoon just as it was leaving the dock for Canton. I have never known fear. Through all the years of my life in China I had seen the masses in their passion commit frightful cruelties, but I personally had always been treated with gentle courtesy.

I stood on the dock as the boat was preparing to leave. I asked a woman where the boat was going. She gained in the course of my long experience in the Legislature and as Chief Executive of New York State. I had no such opportunity to study theology.

My first thought was to answer you with just the faith that is in me. But I knew instinctively that

gift four times. You yourself do me the honor, in addressing me, to refer to 'your fidelity to the morality you have advocated in public and private life and to the religion you have revered; your great record of public trusts successfully and honestly dis

clusions could be logically proved false. charged. During the years I have

It seemed right, therefore, to take counsel with someone schooled in the Church law, from whom I learned whatever is hereafter set forth in definite answer to the theological questions you raise. I selected one whose patriotism neither you nor any other man will question. He wears upon his breast the Distinguished Service Cross of our country, its Distinguished Service Medal, the Ribbon of the Legion of Honor, and the Croix de Guerre with Palm of the French Republic. He was the Catholic Chaplain of the almost wholly Catholic 165th Regiment in the World War Father Francis P. Duffy, now in the military service of my own State.

Taking your letter as a whole and reducing it to commonplace English, you imply that there is conflict between religious loyalty to the Catholic faith and patriotic loyalty to the United States. Everything that has actually happened to me during my long public career leads me to know that no such thing as that is true. I have taken an oath of office in this State nineteen times. Each time I swore to defend and maintain the Constitution of the United States. All of this represents a period of public service in elective office almost continuous since 1903. I have never known any conflict between my official duties and my religious belief. No such conflict could exist. Certainly the people of this State recognize no such conflict. They have testified to my devotion to public duty by electing me to the highest office within their

discharged these trusts I have been a communicant of the Roman Catholic Church. If there were conflict, I, of all men, could not have escaped it, because I have not been a silent man, but a battler for social and political reform. These battles would in their very nature disclose this conflict if there were any.//

I regard public education as one of the foremost functions of government and I have supported to the last degree the State Department of Education in every effort to promote our publicschool system. The largest single item of increased appropriations under my administration appears in the educational group for the support of common schools. Since 1919, when I first became Governor, this item has grown from $9,000,000 to $82,500,000. My aim - and I may say I have succeeded in achieving it has been legislation for child welfare, the protection of working men, women, and children, the modernization of the State's institutions for the care of helpless or unfortunate wards, the preservation of freedom of speech and opinion against the attack of war-time hysteria, and the complete reorganization of the structure of the government of the State.

I did not struggle for these things for any single element, but in the interest of all of the eleven million people who make up the State. In all of this work I had the support of churches of all denominations. I probably know as many ecclesiastics of my Church as any other layman. During my long and active public career I never received

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from any of them anything except cooperation and encouragement in the full and complete discharge of my duty to the State. Moreover, I am unable to understand how anything that I was taught to believe as a Catholic could possibly be in conflict with what is good citizenship. The essence of my faith is built upon the Commandments of God. The law of the land is built upon the Commandments of God. There can be no conflict between them.

Instead of quarreling among ourselves over dogmatic principles, it would be infinitely better if we joined together in inculcating obedience to these Commandments in the hearts and minds of the youth of the country as the surest and best road to happiness on this earth and to peace in the world to come. This is the common ideal of all religions. What we need is more religion for our young people, not less; and the way to get more religion is to stop the bickering among our sects which can only have for its effect the creation of doubt in the minds of our youth as to whether or not it is necessary to pay attention to religion at all.

Then I know your imputations are false when I recall the long list of other public servants of my faith who have loyally served the State. You as a lawyer will probably agree that the office of Chief Justice of the United States is second not even to that of the President in its influence on the national development and policy. That court by its interpretation of the Federal Constitution is a check not only upon the President himself but upon Congress as well. During one fourth of its history it has been presided over by two Catholics, Roger Brooke Taney and Edward Douglass White. No one has suggested that the official conduct of either of these men was affected by any unwarranted religious influence or that religion played with them any part

other than it should play in the life of every God-fearing man.

And I know your imputations are false when I recall the tens of thousands of young Catholics who have risked and sacrificed their lives in defense of our country. These fundamentals of life could not be true unless your imputations were false.

But, wishing to meet you on your own ground, I address myself to your definite questions, against which I have thus far made only general statements. I must first call attention to the fact that you often divorce sentences from their context in such a way as to give them something other than their real meaning. I will specify. You refer to the Apostolic Letter of Pope Leo XIII as 'declaring to the world that the orders of the Church of England were void, her priests not priests,' and so forth. You say that this was the 'strange fruit' of the toleration of England to the Catholics. You imply that the Pope gratuitously issued an affront to the Anglican Church. In fact, this Apostolic Letter was an answer to a request made at the instance of priests of the Anglican Church for recognition by the Roman Catholic Church of the validity of their priestly orders. The request was based on the ground that they had been ordained in succession from the Roman Catholic priests who became the first priests of the Anglican Church. The Apostolic Letter was a mere adverse answer to this request, ruling that Anglican priests were not Roman Catholic priests, and was in no sense the gratuitous insult which you suggest it to be. It was not directed against England or citizens of that Empire.

Again, you quote from the Catholic Encyclopedia that my Church 'regards dogmatic intolerance, not alone as her incontestable right, but as her sacred duty.' And you say that these words watering. The native grass had in one short week grown to a tangled mass. Only the banyan trees, native to the tropics, were in full leaf. Hastily thrown-up trenches, barbed wire, and walls of sandbags added to the desolation. The Punjabi troops had been quartered next to our house. They had flung out white tents and tethered black goats on the grass. Brightturbaned cooks were preparing food over open charcoal burners. A circle of men, in odd khaki shirts with long tails outside knee breeches, played cards under our flame-of-the-woods tree. A little black boy, with a brilliant striped shawl-like garment draped over one shoulder, leaving the right arm and side bare, was pouring a pail of water around the tree's trunk. Two bearded men were smoking a hookah between them. Several others were enjoying a morning dip from the stone embankment in front of our gate; they rubbed their copper bodies with oil from a green bottle until they glistened in the morning sun, then one by one they dived slowly and gracefully into the muddy river. Each swimmer exhibited a different dive.

The loved flowers of my garden were withered corpses. I hastened past them and pushed open a side door. In the dusty, littered breakfast room my husband explained to me the enormity of the offense I had committed in returning to my home when I had been sent away by the British and American consuls. But a man in our house lay very ill. I busied myself with the tasks which a woman can do better than men and kept quietly out of everyone's way. So they let me stay.

Despite the intense heat, - the thermometer hung around ninety in the shade for three months, - the Western men shut up on the tiny island kept up a wonderful spirit. The heads of big businesses, who faced bankruptcy

because of the stoppage of trade, whistled as they trundled home their daily supply of food from the distributing station and prepared it in stifling kitchens. They kept up their morale, their clothes washed, their faces shaved; they took pride in inventing edible dishes out of available ingredients; and they accepted without grumbling the heavy community duties assigned them by the Emergency Council.

Once we did not have bread or flour for eight days. Fruit, fowl, and green vegetables were a far-between luxury sent up from Hongkong when possible, but a scarcity there also because of the boycott. Down the river past us floated flat-bottomed craft piled high with the rich produce of Kwangtung Province: plump young chickens and ducks, high pyramids of juicy oranges, pale yellow much-needed lemons, great clusters of bananas, baskets of papayas, spinach, lettuce, new potatoes, and snowy cauliflower - all those foods that the palate, fed too long on salt and storage meat and canned stuffs, craves. Once, just at twilight, I sat alone on the steps of the deserted boathouse. A boat loaded with golden papayas floated slowly downstream, poled by a kind-faced old man. Scarce above a whisper I bartered with him. His boat drew close, a coin passed from my hand to his, and when he had gone two ripe melons lay under the fold of my skirt. Many months later I learned that the poor old man paid with his life for that transgression of the boycott against Westerners. Convicted in the Hall of Justice, he was wrapped with thin wire and laid out in the sun to die of slow strangulation. A sampan woman whom neither of us noticed made the charge against him.

Long, monotonous days passed. The Chinese Nationalist officials, still uncertain of their own saddle, refused to treat with the Western world. Internal disruption claimed their attention, and with canny wisdom they knew that only by distracting the attention of the multitude with the decoy of a common Western enemy could they mould a national unity.

On July 29, Jacob Boradin, a Russian from Moscow, was openly announced as the chief adviser to the Government. Mr. Norman, an American, and formerly adviser to Dr. Sun Yat-sen, sailed for home. The morning of August 1, five hundred thousand dollars consigned from Russia was brought in at Whampoa to aid the Nationalist Party. A day later ships laden with badly needed oil arrived from the Black Sea. On August 4 an order was issued by the newly formed Central Bank of China that henceforth only notes issued by that bank would be legal tender in South China. The telegraphs, customs, railways, and post offices were directed to accept only such notes after the fifteenth of August. Western officials in these departments chafed under the order, which had no authority from Peking; but such was the strength of the rising Nationalist Party that it was put into effect. The Bank redeems its notes daily with the posts and the customs, giving to them the face value in silver.

New import duties were declared, in addition to the regular customs tariff. No boat was allowed to move cargo until these duties were paid. Contrary to the regulation that all customs returns are to be sent to Peking, the local party declared its right to put them into the Nationalists' coffers. Thus the long battle between the customs authorities and the Nationalists was inaugurated.

Unsigned letters began to reach Shameen showing great apprehension on the part of certain Chinese Conservatives and calling upon the Foreign Powers to use their 'magnificent'

battleships to 'break the back of the bloodsucking, upstart' Nationalist Party. Letters came from servants who had left their Western jobs at the instigation of the general strike of June 21. They told of the horrors of road building, under Russian overseers, into which they had been conscripted; they complained that they were paid no wages and given only one small bowl of rice a day. They begged their 'masters' to find a way to smuggle them back to the island.

On August 18, with the heat at ninety-nine degrees, the workers in the native waterworks, which supplies the entire city, walked out in protest against an order of the Nationalist Government. The people were forced to carry water from the river, which is the emptying place for all sewage. An epidemic of typhoid broke out. People died by hundreds.

Life on August 19 was brightened by a visit of the British flagship Petersfield with Prince George, the fourth son of the King of England, on board. He came ashore dressed in gray trousers and blue coat. He proved a tall, goodlooking, nice-mannered youth, and was much interested in the way in which life on Shameen was conducted.

On August 21, Liao Chung-kai, the 'strong man' of the Nationalist Government, was shot as he left a public meeting. News travels on wings in China. There was a difference in attitude at once on the part of the boat people in front of our house. For the first time since my return to Shameen they passed the time of day with me as I watered the flowers in my garden. They commented upon my clean starched frock and asked me if I had laundered it myself. They explained that the fifth day of the Seventh Moon (August 23, Western calendar) was the Festival of Ch'u shu - or the Stopping of Great Heat.

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