China is the enigma of the east. It is certain that the influences of their defeat will open the Chinese empire very rapidly to modern civilization and investment. But whether or not China retain her conservatism and refuse to adopt the things that are interspersed among her people can scarcely be predicted. The established system has received a severe shock from the Japanese victory, and surely a new or civilized and more vigorous one will take its place. It is an actual fact that so far as can be said by those most familiar with the country, the knowledge that the war has even been in progress has probably not yet penetrated to the confines of the empire, so poor are the means of communication and so indifferent are the people of one region to the things that are happening to those of another province. An experienced traveler in China relates that he penetrated from Shanghai southwestward through China towards India immediately after the destruction of the summer palace of the emperor by French and English troops, and the investiture of Peking thirty-five years ago. The expedition was considered dangerous, as the antagonism of the whole country, smarting under humiliation and defeat was to be feared. On arriving at Ichang, eleven hundred miles from the coast, the war news had just come to the knowledge of the government officials; three hundred miles farther west there was absolute ignorance that any war had occurred. At the city of Pingshan, two thousand miles west of the coast, the party heard of a Mohammedan insurrection of some years’ standing, ranging in the province of Yun-nan, but the bare fact of such an important disturbance had not yet reached the coast. Certain it is however, that if China does assimilate the lesson that she has had a chance to learn, a new power will exist in the east that will need to be watched by western nations.
As to Corea it is difficult again to prophesy. Should Japan take stringent pains to provide for civilizing that hermit kingdom, it is possible that the work may be done, but so difficult are the political conditions in that peninsula, and so unsympathetic are the Corean rulers and chief men with all western ideas of progress, that the task will be a bitter one. If Japan maintains the independence of Corea in its purity, that must mean that she will keep her own hands out of Corean affairs. This is scarcely to be expected, for the energetic empire has imposed upon herself the task of reforming Corea, and it is sure that she will make strenuous efforts to do it.
As one result of the war between China and Japan must be to increase the points of contact between the eastern and western worlds, the fortune of parties and the evolution of domestic politics in those countries must, in future, command to a greater degree than in the past, the attention of American and European observers. Political evolution has been rapid in Japan. Changes which in Anglo-Saxon countries have been the slow product of centuries, are, in this portion of what has been called “the unchanging east,” crowded into little more than a single generation. What may be done in Corea and China cannot be told. But the fairest prophecy would be that the horrors of war will be utilized, by the influence of time and a better understanding, to improve and modernize the Orient.
THE END.
Transcriber’s Note
Pages 127 and 128 do not exist, but the text flows from page 126 to 129.
The image on page 70 is marked as page 71 in the index.
The image of page 112 is marked as page 111 in the index.