The non-aggressive Powers may be defined as those whose citizens have established in the country a substantial position, which their Governments have been slow to protect. The principal representatives of this group are Great Britain and the United States, whose interests in China have many times been defined as commercial, and not territorial. They have acted consistently on the conviction that there is no country in the world where conquest for the sake of commerce was less justifiable than in China, which possesses a large population inured to labour, accustomed to the luxuries of a civilised society, and with unsurpassed aptitude for business. No special credit is due to the two Anglo-Saxon nations for their recognition of these circumstances, except in so far as it indicates an intelligent appreciation of their own interests. They desire, as an ordinary trader or manufacturer would, that a good customer may be kept on his legs, and that a promising inheritance shall not be alienated from the next generation of their merchants. Their policy, however, being essentially passive and conservative, suffers from the defects of these qualities, and is liable to be overborne by the more energetic action of the Powers which we have ventured to place in the aggressive class.
There remains the third group, which consists of one member, and that is Russia. Although Russia is in effect more aggressive than all the others put together, her annexations have been conducted under a different formula from those of Germany, France, or Japan. It is not merely that she has avoided hostilities, and effected her purpose by patient and adroit diplomacy, but that her acquisitions of Chinese territory have not been of the "wild-cat" order, but genuine integral additions to her existing possessions. The expansion of Russia, whether a matter to be deplored or applauded, is at any rate a natural growth, unduly forced at times, but steady and progressive. It is the shadow of this secular advance of Russia that covers the whole Far Eastern situation, and has in fact done so for nearly fifty years. The character of her progress could not be better described, even with the lights we now possess, than it was by Sir Rutherford Alcock as far back as 1855. With rare clearness of vision and firmness of touch he thus foretold the position which Russia was destined to occupy in the Far East:—
China has long been impotent. Russia has within the last few years, by force of diplomacy, appropriated half the province of Manchuria, the ancient patrimony of the reigning dynasty, and with it the command of the river Amur. If this other great Leviathan ... has not yet swallowed the whole empire, it can only be that, great as are its capacities, there are limits imposed by nature to the powers of deglutition and digestion in the largest boa-constrictor or predatory animal yet discovered. In the mean time the danger is more immediate and menacing to Europe than to China, perhaps; for Russia has at Sakhalin, the mouth of the Amur, and the adjoining coasts of the Western continent, laid the foundation for a position as menacing to European commerce as any now existing at the opposite extremity in the Baltic. Stretching with giant arms across the whole breadth of Northern Asia and Europe from fastnesses at each end, Asiatic hordes, directed by Western genius and science, are held in leash, ready to let slip over the fair and fertile south of both continents. The wealthiest regions of both Europe and Asia are at once threatened by this modern colossus.... China, India, and the kingdoms of Southern Europe form but the three different stages of invading progress. Long before the whole of such a gigantic scheme of rule and conquest can have its accomplishment in China—the most helpless as well as the richest of all the victims—Russia will be enabled to reap the first-fruits and take instalments of the larger and more distant spoil, by controlling the trade of Northern China and the rich European trade so recently developed in its seas.
Russia alone has a policy independent at once of accidents, autocrats, shifting governing bodies, and of all personalities, weak or strong. With the accumulated force of past achievements, an unbroken tradition, and great military forces massed on a frontier which is no frontier, Russia among the other Powers now masquerading in the Far East is as the iron vessel floating among the earthenware pots. Russian publicists, in order to strengthen the dominant position to which they aspire, have been proclaiming with increasing insistency that they are the only nation who can deal with the Chinese Question because they are themselves an Asiatic people. They justify this pretension by their primitive Asiatic military ethics, and it is an instructive spectacle to see their forces massacring Chinese populations wholesale while their diplomatists are ostentatiously shielding those in high places from the just consequences of their crimes. The German Emperor has said many clever and some foolish things, but perhaps he never did a wiser one than in making over his schemes of vengeance to his august ally, for the work is more becoming to an Asiatic than a Teutonic people.
From an areopagus composed of these incongruous elements great achievements are expected, but the comparison between the end and the means inspires little confidence as to the result. The task itself is gigantic enough to appal the boldest political experimenter that ever lived, while its complexity involves insoluble contradictions. China, the very Government itself, has been guilty of outrages against foreign nations such as no nation can forgive another. The foreign Powers have been openly and persistently defied—their people massacred throughout the empire. Yet the nations so hated and flouted assume that they have a mission to fulfil in setting up a stable Government in China, a Government to be created for their own convenience, with which they may in future negotiate,—a puppet Government, therefore, yet one which is to maintain peace and good order throughout a vast empire by the prestige of its authority over a loyal and devoted people. As buttresses to the stability of the new régime, "the loyal southern viceroys," as they are termed—loyal to whom, or to what?—deriving authority, it is to be presumed, from the Government which is to be patronised by foreigners, are expected to meet the convenience of the dictators and prevent anarchy in the provinces. In short, the subjective Chinaman, as we have ventured to call the fabulous animal so often evolved from Western consciousness, is once more to be brought on the scene, and do everything that is expected of him.
A puppet Government is an intelligible thing, but of a puppet pulled by a dozen strings no clear conception can be formed. Such, however, has been the anomalous history of foreign relations with China, that the identical state of things now threatening has not been absent from the minds of observers for a whole generation. The missionary question alone was thought likely to result in a deadlock between China and the Powers. More than thirty years ago Sir Rutherford Alcock was impressed with the destructive effect of "each treaty Power dictating to the Government and coercing its officers in their jurisdiction wherever Christians were concerned." This, he thought, "would tend to paralyse and bring into contempt the executive, leading to a process of disintegration fatal to the existence of the Empire." What was then thought applicable to the missionary field now affects the whole range of international intercourse and of Chinese government. We are, in fact, confronted by two anarchies of most serious portent—anarchy in the administration of China, and anarchy among the foreign Powers who are so active in that country. From the beginning of the intervention to protect the Legations anarchy among the Allies has been the predominant feature: it was that which frustrated effective action in June, and led to such severe loss and suffering. Anarchy alone can account for the lawless proceedings at Tientsin, Peking, and on the Chinese coast, which on any other hypothesis would be a disgrace to civilisation. Anarchy has characterised all the utterances of the Western Powers. Beginning at the wrong end with great swelling words full of sound and fury, the Powers who assumed to lead have gradually toned down their threats as they obtained more light on the situation and on their own incapacity to deal with it. The latest expression of this incapacity is the Anglo-German Agreement, already referred to, which perpetuates the fallacy of excluding the Chinese factor from the China question. Yet out of, even by means of, this confusion it is expected that order may be established in China! Similia similibus!
In this desperate imbroglio the ultimate advantage will no doubt fall to those members of the unnatural coalition who have the clearest views and the firmest resolution in giving effect to them. The dubious and vacillating Powers frittering away their political forces, espousing every contradiction in succession, and turning in weariness from the disgusting scenes in which they will have reluctantly participated, will in all probability leave the path open for their neighbours who have steadier aims and fewer scruples.
Russia has been in real, though not nominal or legal, possession of Manchuria since 1896. She has absorbed in times past many stony deserts and barren solitudes, but in Manchuria she has for the first time acquired a rich territory with an all-important sea-base and a virile population, whereby her dominant position in Eastern Asia has been rendered inexpugnable. China lies at her feet. Obviously, therefore, her interests in that empire are not only distinct from, but opposed to, those of every other Power: for while they may desire (1) to support an efficient government and keep the empire of China on its legs, and (2) to cut off slices of the territory for their own use,—two contradictory and mutually destructive policies,—Russia has no need to be anxious, either as to the efficiency of any Chinese Government or as to her own ulterior interests in the territory. The looser the substance to be absorbed the more painless will be the process of absorption. Once established in strength in Manchuria, disorder on her frontier may afford the perhaps not unwelcome opportunity of restoring order on her own terms,—of, in fact, continuing the process by which Siberia with Central and North-Eastern Asia have, in the course of two hundred years, been gradually incorporated into the Russian Empire. "It may well be doubted," wrote Sir Rutherford Alcock in 1868, "if this vast empire (of China) is not too large to be any longer governed from Peking. It is impossible to conceive a more disadvantageous site for the capital." Disadvantageous, perhaps, to China, whose centre of gravity lies a thousand miles to the south; but not disadvantageous to a Power whose strength is consolidated five hundred miles to the north.[39]
And the veto which Russia has exercised over the acts of the Chinese Government since 1895, whereby she has been able, at her pleasure, to frustrate the enterprises of other Powers, is not likely to fall into abeyance when that Government has been prostrated by its own folly. For the weaker the Chinese Government becomes the greater will be its need of correction and guidance. But we have only to imagine half-a-dozen Powers, each aspiring, and some of them fully resolved, to exercise their special veto over the proposals of the others, to realise the tragic complexity of the international problems which now present themselves for solution. A government holding together three hundred millions of people ripened for rebellion, potentially at war with the rest of the world, and yet governing under multiple tutelage—such is the prospect before us. Of all the legacies which the nineteenth bequeaths to the twentieth century, there is none more portentous than that of the sick giant of the Far East.