When the empire of Annam, by the treaty of June 5, 1862, ceded to France the three eastern provinces of Cochinchina, France acquired several new neighbors in the Far East. From 1862 on, she was constantly occupied by her political and economic relations with these neighbors. She was led inexorably by her will to protect her conquest to further and further territorial expansion. The first result of her policy was the establishment of a protectorate over Cambodia in 1863. The next consequence was the annexation of the three remaining provinces of Cochinchina in 1867.The third logical step in her Far Eastern progress was an arrangement with Siam in 1867 by which the latter recognized her protectorate over Cambodia at the price of territorial concessions. A further advance was registered in 1874 by the establishment of a French protectorate over Annam.

The problem proposed by the editor of the Quarterly to the members of this symposium is to consider the varying patterns of railway development in three Far Eastern countries. It is a particularly challenging problem because the influential role which railroads have played in Western economic growth leads one naturally to ask whether Western experience has been repeated in the East, and, if not, how the differences may be explained. This question does, indeed, seem to have been the central one raised by the three following articles.

With the formal abolition of the Tokugawa Shogunate on January 3, 1868, there was created in Japan a governmental void which was not filled finally and satisfactorily until 1889. The search of Japanese leaders for a satisfactory government structure for the new state was thus one of long duration. It did not begin seriously until the successful outcome of the military struggle with the Tokugawa forces in the early months of 1868 seemed assured.

The poetry of every nation and age is a complex expression of the history, spirit, and individual genius of a people; and, as each successive generation evaluates a native or an alien poetic tradition from its own historical and cultural vantage-point, it discovers meanings and values as well as limitations and weaknesses in the poetry it reads. Each generation must reassess for itself the glory that was Greece or the grandeur of Japan—so that the attempt to describe the formative elements which underlie Japanese poetic expression is more than a single essay, individual, or generation can accomplish. But the undertaking nevertheless seems necessary today, when we can no longer be satisfied with the older extremes of Victorian condescension towards “Japanese epigrams”; the exclusively historical or biographical treatment which evades direct analysis of the poetry; or that simple-minded exoticism which prefers ignorant rapture to the disciplined effort of literary criticism. For the Westerner as well as for the Japanese, poetry lives only as it is understood and felt, and our experience of Japanese poetry today must reflect contemporary critical standards and techniques of analysis—the means of understanding given us by our own age and culture.

The first census of the Philippines during the period of American occupation was taken on March 2,1903. About sixteen years later, the second census was taken. The need for a new census became apparent as the Philippines entered the Commonwealth period and approached final independence. The National Assembly passed a bill providing for the taking of a census which was approved and became Commonwealth Act No. 170, on November 12, 1936. President Quezon requested the services of an expert on census matters from the United States Government on August 17, 1937. The services of Mr. Ray Hurley, Acting Chief Statistician of Territorial, Insular, and Foreign Statistics of the United States Bureau, of the Census, were secured and upon his arrival in Manila he was appointed Expert on Census Matters effective as of October 9, 1937.