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Chances of Success? In Tokyo last week the Imperial Government announced firmly and without heat that if the League takes the stand taken by the Lytton Report then Japan will withdraw from the League—thus presenting League States with a supreme challenge to their courage and their power.
Chinese statesmen privately hailed the Lytton Report as "the best solution thus far offered," but no member of China's National Government would say a word for publication. They feared of course that the Chinese people will find in the Report just enough concessions to Japan (and to common sense) to reject it in toto as "a betrayal of China."
In Washington it was easy for Statesman Stimson to congratulate himself on passages in the Lytton Report which seemed to accord with his passive policy of "nonrecognition of Manchukuo." On the contrary the Lytton Report calls for action, action and more action by the League and all Great Powers, including the U. S.
London's Conservative Morning Post, organ of Britain's ruling party, was "sorry to have to say it" but felt that "the Chinese Government ... is a polite fiction" and therefore that the Lytton procedure of inducing Japan to negotiate with a nullity was absurd—the inference being that Japan should keep what she can.
In Paris Le Matin, semi-official French Government daily, dismissed the Report as mere ammunition for Chinese propagandists, added that Soviet propagandists will doubtless pervert it (i. e. will represent the Great Powers as trying to seize a share of Japan's loot in Manchuria through the "foreign advisers" recommended by Imperialist Lytton).
Nowhere? "The Report leads nowhere!" stormed Viscount Rothermere's Daily Mail, charging that Lord Lytton ignored "the all-important fact that but for Japan's prodigious sacrifices in her war of 1904 and 1905 with Russia. Manchuria would be today a Soviet province."
On Nov. 14 the League Council must consider the Lytton Report, may send it to the Assembly for full-dress discussion by 57 League powers & nations. Taking the optimistic view, London's urbane Times calmly remarked that Japan's occupation of Manchuria is costing her millions of dollars, yielding no returns and that the Japanese Treasury "is not in a position to stand this drain if it continues much longer."
In Tokyo last week the Army & Navy demanded "extra appropriations" totaling $96,000,000—this with the yen off gold and with Japan entering the second decade of her Depression. Remorseless economic factors seemed, last week, the strongest force tending to Lyttonize Japan.