Japan is ungrateful. She always has been, and, I fear, always will be. She has achieved over an adversary, in most essentials abler than herself, a brilliant run of, at least temporary, victories, largely because she has adopted Western methods of warfare; and now she is celebrating the victory of her European-borrowed arms by slapping Europe in the face. How very like a woman! How very like Japan!
The Emperor of Japan has politely informed us—cautiously informed us through the Japanese minister in Washington—that we must please mind our own business, for “no offer of mediation on the part of a third Power would be accepted by Japan until her object, which was to crush the power of China, had been completely attained.”
And it is being more or less openly said (I believe the authority I quote to be entirely reliable) on the streets of Yokohama: “When we’ve finished China we must teach one of the big European Powers a lesson. England, for instance, thinks a great deal too much of herself and not half enough of us.” If Japan is really ambitious for a war with England, let us hope that she will soon find an excuse for it. The sooner such warfare is waged the better—for China—and it will not greatly inconvenience us.
Japan has drunk of the awful, red wine of war, and the wine has gone to her pretty little head. Let us hope that she will not have too much of a headache in the inevitable morning, and that she may, for the near future at least, have the good sense to drink our health and her own in the beverages that best suit her: a cup of tea and a wee thimbleful of saki.
There are two reasons why Japan has so far triumphed over China, reasons which prove Japan our debtor; and yet Japan has, as far as we are concerned, borne her honours so badly that it deserves at least our passing attention.
Compare China and Japan on the map; compare their populations and it certainly seems that by this time the Chinese Goliath should have crushed and appropriated the Japanese David. But maps don’t tell us everything, and figures lie, if we ask them to say more than they ought. Figures are excellent things, if we permit them to mind their own business. But they are not philosophers; they are not logicians. Then, too, David always has so many advantages over Goliath. David can get about so much quicker. He can move his body sooner than the giant can move one limb. His hand can receive the message sent it by his brain in a fraction of the time that the same transaction takes Goliath.
Perhaps we have all—those of us who are surprised at China’s at least momentary defeat—been looking too much upon the surface, taking a too topographical view of the situation. Bulk is not always a blessing. It may become an embarrassment. It is, at any rate, often misleading. The size of China, and its vast population have been misleading to many of us who have had more interest in the present Chino-Japanese war than knowledge of China and Japan.
I call the war the Chino-Japanese war, because it is a Chino-Japanese war. Korea is the excuse for the war, not the cause of the war. Poor, picturesque, badly-used place, let us pray that she may not be too the victim, altogether the victim of the war.
China has been, so far at least, quite unable to mobilize her forces. Japan—who is the art concentration of many nations—has concentrated her comparatively small, but altogether fine forces, concentrated them with a nicety and a shrewdness that might well be a lesson to the Europe from which she has learned her art of war.
The Art of War! Japan seems indeed to be making War a fine art—but, alas! she is making it, no less than it has always been, a butchery!