Press-made feeling was both stronger and had more influence on the action of Government in England than in any other country. The war had upset the balance of power in Asia, but the press took no heed of that, and urged with conspicuous success that the Japanese should on no account be hindered in their seizure of the spoils. Other countries, keeping a cooler outlook on eventualities, were unable to regard the occupation of Liao-tung by Japanese forces with the equanimity with which it was viewed in England, though they made no objection to the enormous indemnities forced from China, which might indeed be philosophically regarded by them as a tax levied specially on British trade. Being threatened in her weakest frontier by this ambitious military Power, Russia had intimated before war began, in no ambiguous terms, that she could not tolerate such a neighbour, and on the conclusion of peace she took steps to give effect to that resolution. Russia had throughout the war been extremely nervous about the possible action of Great Britain, and would have gone considerable lengths to come to an understanding with her; but towards the end, when the pretensions of the Japanese began to assume extravagant dimensions, their moral effect on the Great Powers enabled her to dispense with English favour by drawing France and Germany to her support. The gravity of the Japanese demands was the factor that drew the three Powers together, and Li Hung-chang, when he went as envoy to Japan in March 1895, assented to the indemnity and the surrender of territory on the assurance given him that the more excessive the conditions of peace he might be forced to sign, the more certain were they to be revised by the intervention of the Powers. The three Powers proved strong enough to induce Japan to give up Liao-tung for an increased indemnity, and the future of the Far East thus was arranged in conferences from which Great Britain had excluded herself. There were several reasons for the abstention of the British Government from taking a share in this settlement. One was the complete failure of their Intelligence Department before, during, and after the war. But the fervour of the nation in deprecating interference with the Japanese was a sufficient, and no doubt a welcome, warrant for the inaction of the Government. An experienced observer of English public life remarked afterwards that he had never known a situation in which the press, metropolitan and provincial, had displayed such entire unanimity and lavished such unmixed praise on the Government for its isolation. And yet it was a unanimity of nescience, of simple abdication, the surrender of a position in the Far East which had been built up for two generations on the permanent interests of the country, and which, sacrificed at the critical moment, is gone beyond recall. The "new diplomacy," uninstructed popular impulse, never had a freer field; for the Government which it dominated was scarcely more enlightened, and decidedly more apathetic, than the nation itself.
MINISTERS OF THE YAMÊN OF FOREIGN AFFAIRS.
H.E. Shên Kuei-fên.
H.E. Tung Hsün.
H.E. Mao Chang-tsi.
From a photo by J. Thomson, Grosvenor Street, W.
CHAPTER XXXII.
THE RESETTLEMENT OF THE FAR EAST.
An unsettlement—Interference of Russia, Germany, and France—China reduced to dependence—Disintegration proceeds—France forces China to violate her treaties with England—Russian approval—The loans pressed upon China—Russia vetoes English loan, substituting a French one, Russia standing security—Germany seizes Kiaochow—Russia seizes Port-Arthur—England's remonstrance unheeded—A diplomatic correspondence explained—British public aroused to importance of the Far Eastern question—Call upon Government to take protective action.
It would perhaps be in stricter accordance with facts to describe what ensued on the Chinese collapse as a process of unsettlement than resettlement, since no man now living is likely to see the end of the dislocation effected by the transactions of 1895. The crude ingredients of national policy, stripped of the international decencies with which they were wont to be invested, were then thrown into the caldron; elementary forces, naked and undisguised, confronted each other; and the scramble which moderate men had hoped to see indefinitely postponed was entered into with the zest of a Cornish wrecking raid. The officious interference of quasi-friendly Powers to save the derelict empire from mutilation proved, according to unvarying experience, a remedy which was worse than the disease. Russia, Germany, and France proceeded to treat China as a No Man's Land; disintegration was the order of the day. The example was, of course, contagious. Other Powers, with no more substantial ground of claim than was afforded by the defencelessness of China, began whetting their knives to carve the moribund carcass.