II. JAPAN AGGRESSIVE.
Extraordinary progress of Japan—Nation becomes restless—Invades Formosa—Bought off by China.
The civil war in Japan had been fought with characteristic energy during three years, when a revolution, the like of which was never before seen, established the new empire on the double foundations of hereditary monarchy and popular suffrage. The effect of the revolution was to concentrate the whole strength of the State under the government of the Mikado, and thus enable it to give free play to the widest ambitions. With incredible rapidity the nation made itself efficient for every enterprise of peace or war. The best that the Western world had to teach was eagerly appropriated by a people just aroused from a long sleep, and anxious to make up lost time. They went so fast, indeed, that onlookers shook their heads, and their best friends would have applied the brake had it been possible. But the nation was self-reliant, and in its first adolescence it began to be aggressive.
Within six years of the revolution of 1868 an expedition was sent to invade the Chinese island of Formosa. Through the good offices of Sir Thomas Wade, British Minister in Peking, war between the two empires was averted, and the Japanese forces withdrawn. They were virtually bought off, a proceeding characterised by Sir H. Parkes as pusillanimous on the part of the empire of China. The transaction really sealed the fate of China, in advertising to the world that here was a rich empire which was ready to pay, but not ready to fight. The euphemisms under which the ransom was disguised deceived no one unless it were the Chinese themselves. The vast cessions to Russia, incredible as they appeared, had at least the palliation of a dire emergency, and verbal equivalents in the shape of promises of deliverance therefrom. The submission to Japan, on the other hand, was made in a time of comparative ease.
The incident had yet a further significance. The pretext of the Japanese invasion was injuries done to shipwrecked Liuchiuans, a people whom China till then and for some years later considered her own vassals, and who had for centuries paid her regular tribute. Such an episode was therefore a sure mark of imperial decadence;—a definite step, moreover, in the downward process, to be followed not long after by the Japanese boldly asserting a claim to the Liuchiu Islands, against which China could only interpose an inarticulate protest. The meaning of these indications was not likely to be lost either on the Japanese, who were more immediately concerned, or on other less interested onlookers. And what has the subsequent history of China been but a development of the symptoms?