If the reader keeps these great facts carefully in mind a new light will dawn on him and the urgency of the Chinese question will be disclosed. The Japanese Demands of 1915, instead of being fantastic and far-fetched, as many have supposed, are shown to be very intelligently drawn-up, the entire Treaty position in China having been most exhaustively studied, and every loophole into the vast region left untouched by the ex-territorialized Powers marked down for invasion. For Western nations, in spite of exorbitant demands at certain periods in Chinese history, having mainly limited themselves to acquiring coastal and communication privileges, which were desired more for genuine purposes of trade than for encompassing the destruction of Chinese autonomy, are to-day in a disadvantageous position which the Japanese have shown they thoroughly understand by not only tightening their hold on Manchuria and Shantung, but by going straight to the root of the matter and declaring on every possible occasion that they alone are responsible for the peace and safety of the Far East—and this in spite of the fact that their plan of 1915 was exposed and partially frustrated. But the chief force behind the Japanese Foreign Office, it should be noted, is militarist; and it is a point of honour for the Military Party to return to the charge in China again and again until there is definite success or definite failure.
Now in view of the facts which have been so voluminously set forth in preceding chapters, it is imperative for men to realize that the struggle in the Far East is like the Balkan Question a thing rooted in geography and peoples, and cannot be brushed aside or settled by compromises. The whole future of Chinese civilization is intimately bound up with the questions involved, and the problem instead of becoming easier to handle must become essentially more difficult from day to day. Japan's real objective being the termination of the implied trusteeship which Europe and America still exercise in the Far East, the course of the European war must intimately effect the ultimate outcome. If that end is satisfactory for democracies, China may reasonably claim to share in the resulting benefits; if on the other hand the Liberal Powers do not win an overwhelming victory which shall secure the sanctity of Treaties for all time, it will go hard for China. Outwardly, the immediate goal which Japan seeks to attain is merely to become the accredited spokesman of Eastern Asia, the official representative; and, using this attorneyship as a cloak for the advancement of objects which other Powers would pursue on different principles, so impregnably to entrench herself where she has no business to be that no one will dare to attempt to turn her out. For this reason we see revived in Manchuria on a modified scale the Eighteenth Century device, once so essential a feature of Dutch policy in the struggle against Louis XIV, namely the creation of "barrier-cities" for closing and securing a frontier by giving them a special constitution which withdraws them from ordinary jurisdiction and places foreign garrisons in them. This is precisely what is going on from the Yalu to Eastern Mongolia, and this procedure no doubt will be extended in time to other regions as opportunities arise. Already in Shantung the same policy is being pursued and there are indications that it is being thought of in Fuhkien; whilst the infantry garrison which was quietly installed at Hankow—600 miles up the Yangtsze river—at the time of the Revolution of 1911 is apparently to be made permanent. Allowing her policy to be swayed by men who know far too little of the sea, Japan stands in imminent danger of forgetting the great lesson which Mahan taught, that for island-peoples sea-power is everything and that land conquests which diminish the efficacy of that power are merely a delusion and snare. Plunging farther and farther into the vast regions of Manchuria and Mongolia which have been the graves of a dozen dynasties, Japan is displaying increasing indifference for the one great lesson which the war has yielded—the overwhelming importance of the sea.[[30]] Necessarily guardian of the principles on which intercourse in Asia is based, because she framed those principles and fought for them and has built up great edifices under their sanction, British sea-power—now allied for ever, let us hope, with American power—nevertheless remains and will continue to remain, in spite of what may be half-surreptitiously done to-day, the dominant factor in the Far East as it is in the Far West. Withdrawn from view for the time being, because of the exigencies of the hour and because the Anglo-Japanese Alliance is still counted a binding agreement, Western sea-power nevertheless stands there, a heavy cloud in the offing, full of questionings regarding what is going on in the Orient, and fully determined, let us pray, one day to receive frank answers. For the right of every race, no matter how small or weak, to enjoy the inestimable benefits of self-government and independence may be held to have been so absolutely established that it is a mere question of time for the doctrine not only to be universally accepted but to be universally applied. In many cases, it is true, the claims of certain races are as yet incapable of being expressed in practical state-forms; but where nationalities have long been well-defined, there can be no question whatsoever that a properly articulated autonomy must be secured in such a way as to preclude the possibility of annexations.
Now although in their consideration of Asia it is notorious that Western statesmen have not cared to keep in mind political concepts which have become enthroned in Europe, owing to the fact that an active element of opposition to such concepts was to be found in their own policies, a vast change has undoubtedly been recently worked, making it certain that the claims of nationalism are soon to be given the same force and value in the East as in the West. But before there can be any question of Asia for the Asiatics being adopted as a root principle by the whole world, it will have to be established in some unmistakable form that the surrender of the policy of conquest which Europe has pursued for four centuries East of the Suez Canal will not lead to its adoption by an Asiatic Power under specious forms which hide the glittering sword. If that can be secured, then the present conflict will have truly been a War of Liberation for the East as well as for the West. For although Japan has been engaged for some years in declaring to all Asiatics under her breath that she holds out the hand of a brother to them, and dreams of the days when the age of European conquests will be nothing but a distant memory, her actions have consistently belied her words and shown that she has not progressed in political thought much beyond the crude conceptions of the Eighteenth Century. Thus Korea, which fell under her sway because the nominal independence of the country had long made it the centre of disastrous international intrigues, is governed to-day as a conquered province by a military viceroy without a trace of autonomy remaining and without any promise that such a régime is only temporary. Although nothing in the undertakings made with the Powers has ever admitted that a nation which boasts of an ancient line of kings, and which gave Japan much of her own civilization, should be stamped under foot in such manner, the course which politics have taken in Korea has been disastrous in the extreme ever since Lord Lansdowne in 1905, as British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, pointed out in a careful dispatch to the Russian Government that Korea was a region which fell naturally under the sway of Japan. Not only has a tragic fate overcome the sixteen million inhabitants of that country, but there has been a covert extension of the principles applied to them to the people of China.
Now if as we say European concepts are to have universal meaning, and if Japan desires European treatment, it is time that it is realized that the policy followed in Korea, combined with the attempt to extend that treatment to soil where China rightly claims undisputed sovereignty, forms an insuperable barrier to Japan being admitted to the inner council of the nations.[[31]] No one wishes to deny to Japan her proper place in the world, in view of her marvellous industrial progress, but that place must be one which fits in with modern conceptions and is not one thing to the West and another to the East. Even the saying which was made so much of during the Russian war of 1904, that Korea in foreign hands was a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan—has been shown to be inherently false by the lessons of the present struggle, the Korean dagger-point being 120 sea miles from the Japanese coast. Such arguments clearly show that if the truce which was hastily patched up in 1905 is to give way to a permanent peace, that can be evolved only by locking on to the Far East the principles which are in process of being vindicated in Europe. In other words, precisely as Poland is to be given autonomy, so must Korea enjoy the same privileges, the whole Japanese theory of suzerainty on the Eastern Asiatic Continent being abandoned. To re-establish a proper balance of power in the Far East, the Korean nation, which has had a known historical existence of 1,500 years, must be reinstated in something resembling its old position; for Korea has always been the keystone of the Far Eastern arch, and it is the destruction of that arch more than anything else which has brought the collapse of China so perilously near.
Once the legitimate aspirations of the Korean people have been satisfied, the whole Manchurian-Mongolian question will assume a different aspect, and a true peace between China and Japan will be made possible. It is to no one's interest to have a Polish question in the Far East with all the bitterness and the crimes which such a question must inevitably lead to; and the time to obviate the creation of such a question is at the very beginning before it has become an obsession and a great international issue. Although the Japanese annexation may be held to have settled the question once and for all, we have but to point to Poland to show that a race can pass through every possible humiliation and endure every possible species of truncation without dying or abating by one whit its determination to enjoy what happier races have won.
The issue is a vital one. China by her recent acts has given a categorical and unmistakable reply to all the insidious attempts to place her outside and beyond the operation of international law and all those sanctions which make life worth living; and because of the formal birth of a Foreign Policy it can be definitely expected that this nation, despite its internal troubles and struggles, will never rest content until she has created a new nexus of world-relationships which shall affirm and apply every one of the principles experience elsewhere has proved are the absolute essentials to peace and happiness. China is already many decades ahead of Japan in her theory of government, no matter what the practice may be, the marvellous revolution of 1911 having given back to this ancient race its old position of leader in ideas on the shores of the Yellow Sea. The whole dream Japan has cherished, and has sought to give form to during the war, is in the last analysis antiquated and forlorn and must ultimately dissolve into thin air; for it is monstrous to suppose, in an age when European men have sacrificed everything to free themselves from the last vestiges of feudalism, that in the Far East the cult of Sparta should remain a hallowed and respected doctrine. Japan's policy in the Far East during the period of the war has been uniformly mischievous and is largely responsible for the fierce hatreds which burst out in 1917 over the war issue; and China will be forced to raise at the earliest possible moment the whole question of the validity of the undertakings extorted from her in 1915 under the threat of an ultimatum. Although the precise nature of Anglo-Japanese diplomacy during the vital eleven days from the 4th to the 15th August, 1914 [i.e. from the British declaration of war on Germany to the Japanese ultimatum regarding Kiaochow] remains a sealed book, China suspects that Japan from the very beginning of the present war world-struggle has taken advantage of England's vast commitments and acted ultra vires. China hopes and believes that Britain will never again renew the Japanese alliance, which expires in 1921, in its present form, particularly now that an Anglo-American agreement has been made possible. China knows that in spite of all coquetting with both the extreme radical and military parties which is going on daily in Peking and the provinces the secret object of Japanese diplomacy is either the restoration of the Manchu dynasty, or the enthronement of some pliant usurper, a puppet-Emperor being what is needed to repeat in China the history of Korea. Japan would be willing to go to any lengths to secure the attainment of this reactionary object. Faithful to her "divine mission," she is ceaselessly stirring up trouble and hoping that time may still be left her to consolidate her position on the Asiatic mainland, one of her latest methods being to busy herself at distant points in the Pacific so that Western men for the sake of peace may be ultimately willing to abandon the shores of the Yellow Seas to her unchallenged mastery.
The problem thus outlined becomes a great dramatic thing. The lines which trace the problem are immense, stretching from China to every shore bathed by the Pacific and then from there to the distant west. Whenever there is a dull calm, that calm must be treated solely as an intermission, an interval between the acts, a preparation for something more sensational than the last episode, but not as a permanent settlement which can only come by the methods we have indicated. For the Chinese question is no longer a local problem, but a great world-issue which statesmen must regulate by conferences in which universal principles will be vindicated if they wish permanently to eliminate what is almost the last remaining international powder-magazine. A China that is henceforth not only admitted to the family of nations on terms of equality but welcomed as a representative of Liberalism and a subscriber to all those sanctions on which the civilization of peace rests, will directly tend to adjust every other Asiatic problem and to prevent a recrudescence of those evil phenomena which are the enemies of progress and happiness. Is it too much to dream of such a consummation? We think not. It is to America and to England that China looks to rehabilitate herself and to make her Republic a reality. If they lend her their help, if they are consistent, there is still no reason why this democracy on the shores of the Yellow Sea should not be reinstated in the proud position it occupied twenty centuries ago, when it furnished the very silks which clothed the daughters of the Caesars.
FOOTNOTES:
[ [27] ] The growth of the Chinese press is remarkable. Although no complete statistics are available there is reason to believe that the number of periodicals in China now approximates 10,000, the daily vernacular newspapers in Peking alone exceeding 60. Although no newspaper in China prints more than 20,000 copies a day, the reading public is growing at a phenomenal rate, it being estimated that at least 50 million people read the daily publications, or hear what they say,—a fact which is deemed so politically important that all political parties and groups have their chains of organs throughout the country.
[ [28] ] The mediaeval condition of Chinese trade taxation is well illustrated by a Memorandum which the reader will find in the appendix. One example may be quoted. Timber shipped from the Yalu river, i.e. from Chinese territory, to Peking, pays duties at five different places, the total amount of which aggregates 20 per cent. of its market value; whilst timber from America, with transit dues and Peking Octroi added, only pays 10 per cent.! China is probably the only country that has ever existed that discriminates against its own goods and gives preference to the foreigner,—through the operation of the Treaties.