To find the facts in Japan and China's quarrel about Manchuria, to establish these facts with high authority, and to suggest an impartial solution, five wise Westerners went out to the everchanging East eight months ago.
Their chairman, Victor Alexander George Robert, second Earl of Lytton, first drew breath at Simla, the summer capital of British India, while his father was Viceroy 56 years ago. In 1925 lean, scholarly Lord Lytton was himself Viceroy of India for five months. He knows his East. Release of the Lytton Report last week stirred the deepest interest of both East and West. If the League of Nations, which sent out the Lytton Commission, now proceeds to accept its findings and back up its recommendations, the League, threatened today with financial bank- ruptcy (see p. 13), has a last chance to escape political and moral bankruptcy as well.
Number of words in the Lytton Report: 100,000. Eminently readable three-decker novels of twice that length used to be tossed off with ease by Lord Lytton's grandfather, famed Victorian Novelist Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Such tossing is in the Lytton blood. The Report, as the London Times promptly declared last week, is "an admirable and exhaustive survey, compiled with the literary distinction traditional in the family of the Chairman."
With Chairman Lytton worked the "unofficial" U. S. commissioner, dynamic, fact-ferreting General Frank Ross McCoy (close friend of President Roosevelt) and the three "official" Commissioners: French General Henri Claudel, who commanded the ist French Colonial Corps (African) in the War; German Dr. Heinrich Schnee, last Governor of German East Africa (1912-19); and Italian Count Aldrovandi-Marescotti, recalled in 1929 from his post as Ambassador to Germany because a copy of Il Duce's most private code had vanished inexplicably from the Berlin Embassy.
Facts found. Casting out hypocrisy, the Lytton Report defines the relations of China and Japan today as "war in disguise."
Manchuria is found to be the Three Eastern Provinces of China, whereas Japan has contended that it includes a fourth province (Jehol) and much of Inner Mongolia.
Henry Pu Yi, onetime "Boy Emperor of China" and now Japan's puppet head of the new state of "Manchukuo" (Manchuria), is stated to be not its Regent but its "President."
"The new state could not have been formed," the Report finds, "without . . . the presence of Japanese troops and the activities of Japanese officials, both civil and military. For this reason the present regime cannot be considered to have been called into existence by a genuine and spontaneous independence movement" as the Japanese Government still claims it was.
Finally the Report finds that the closely interlocked Communist-bandit armies now dominating central China constitute a regime which has become an "actual rival of the National Government. Thus with rare courage the Commission bared the fact that what is recognized by the Great Powers as the Government of China is a regime no more than "competitive" with China's Communists.