[429] "It is, I think, an error to assume that elimination of the school and immigration questions will mean complete restoration of the former Japanese-American entente. This never can be restored in the shape which it previously assumed. Conditions never will revert to the situation which gave it vitality. It is perhaps not going too far to say that relations of America and Japan are only now becoming serious, in the sense that they directly include propositions about which modern nations will, upon due provocation, go to war.... The genesis of a collision between Japan and the United States of America, if it ever occurs, will be found in conditions on the mainland of Asia." (The Far Eastern Question, by T. F. Millard (T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), pp. 60-61.)
[430] The question was asked by Captain Murray, M.P., and answered by Mr. McKinnon Wood, in September 1909.
[431] The "Mackay" Commercial Treaty between Great Britain and China was signed at Shanghai on September 5, 1902. Likin is an internal tax on merchandise in transit.
[432] A good general view of the nature of the grave difficulties that stand in the way of currency reform may be gained from a perusal of H. B. Morse's The Trade and Administration of the Chinese Empire (Shanghai, 1908). See especially pp. 166-9. Another recent work well worth consulting is T. F. Millard's The Far Eastern Question (T. Fisher Unwin, 1909), pp. 316 seq.
[433] Asiatic Studies (Second Series, 2nd ed.), pp. 374-5, 376-7.
[434] The following remarks by Lafcadio Hearn on the question of the admission of foreign capital into Japan are not inapposite. "It appears to me that any person comprehending, even in the vaguest way, the nature of money-power and the average conditions of life throughout Japan, must recognise the certainty that foreign capital, with right of land-tenure, would find means to control legislation, to control government, and to bring about a state of affairs that would result in the practical domination of the Empire by alien interests.... Japan has incomparably more to fear from English or American capital than from Russian battleships and bayonets." (Japan: An Interpretation, p. 510.) Urgent economic considerations have, of course, compelled Japan not only to admit foreign capital in enormous amounts, but even to make heavy sacrifices in order to obtain it: but if any other course had been open to her she would gladly have adopted it.
[435] Article xii. of the Mackay Treaty reads thus: "China having expressed a strong desire to reform her judicial system and to bring it into accord with that of Western nations, Great Britain agrees to give every assistance to such reform, and she will also be prepared to relinquish her extra-territorial rights when she is satisfied that the state of the Chinese laws, the arrangement for their administration, and other considerations warrant her doing so."