The Truth about China and Japan

CHAPTER 1. 总论：中日早期关系

GENERAL INTRODUCTION— EARLY RE-LATIONS OF CHINESE AND JAPA-NESE

The best authorities are agreed that the ancient Chinese originally migrated from a point near the Caspian Sea across what is now arid desert to the upper reaches of the Yellow River. The date at which this exodus took place is so remote that all trace of it has been lost; and although the proofs of the Central Asian origin of the race are satisfying to scholars, they are of a nature which cannot be here adequately summarized. Excavations recently made in Honan province have, however, brought to light utensils and modellings in baked clay of the most primitive description, including Noah's arks of almost Biblical exactitude. Ac-cording to some experts, these are conclusive

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TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

evidence not only of a settlement which may be counted at least six thousand years old but point to a close cultural connection with very distant regions. It may be that systematic search will some day disclose new and remark-able facts concerning Chinese origins in the cradle of the human race.

In any case it is quite certain that thirty centuries before the Christian era the Chinese had already occupied most of the territory com-prised in the modem provinces of Kansu, Shensiy and Honan ; that their route eastwards — ^towards the sea — was barred by forests may be assumed. It is interesting to record that .their pictorial character for 'East' is a sun shining through trees, whilst the word * obstruc-tion» is compounded by placing the selfsame tree in a doorway. The remote ancestors of the race certainly cleared the land as they ad-vanced, changing from a pastoral cultivator race, tilling the soil in small patches, into a purely agricultural nation at a time when clas-sical Greece had not yet emerged out of the dim mists. The Chinese still venerate the name of the ruler who established tillage as the basic institution, and who rightly assumed that there is no increment so rich and so bene-ficial to mankind as the increment of the fields.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Twenty-five hundred years ago, when Con-fucius and Laotzu flourished, China was already a very old country. Although the celebrated Stone Drums in the Confucian Temple in Peking, which are said to record the hunting adventures of an emperor of the Chou dynasty (b.c. 876), show the most ancient writing known, it is probable that the transition from tying knots on cords, as a means of conveying ideas, to cutting notches on wood and finally to writing pictorial and ideographic symbols, took place many centuries earlier. The conception of a central kingship was certainly well-fixed by the time of the first emperors of the Hsia dynasty (b.c. 2200) ; and Confucius, writing in the sixth century before Christ on the discon-tents of the age, constantly bewails the spa-cious days of the legendary rulers Yao and Shun, who ruled as shepherd kings anterior to the Hsia. Remembering how much older the human race is to-day admitted to be than was believed a generation ago, it is by no means improbable that the Chinese entered the Yellow River valley at least a hundred centuries ago.

This ancient people of the pre-Christian era was a small, warring community of not more than a few million souls. Distributed along the loess soil of the broad, central valleys, their ex-

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pansion daring a very long period was hardly noticeable, wars and expeditions tending to. monopolize their attention and breaking up the country into petty states in spite of the Impe-rial rule. The North China of to-day was then nothing but an arid frontier-land, a glacis ; and the present metropolitan province of Chihli as wild as much of Mongolia still is. That bar-barian raiders from the wastes of Central Asia were a pest from the earliest times, and harried the race as soon as it had acquired ease and wealth from tillage, may be gathered from the policy of the Emperor Chin Shih Huang-ti (b.c. 249-206). It was this ruler who is still celebrated in the Annals for two dis-similar yet closely- related acts: he burned China's classics, because they were brining decadence to the race, and began the building of the Great Wall as a protection for his newly-formed Empire.

The oldest capitals of China, Hsianfu in Shensi and Loyang in Honan, were soon di-rectly protected by this vast rampart which was methodically extended by succeeding dynasties, until in the time of the Mings the last gap between the Mongolian mountains and the sea was finally closed at Shanhaikwan. Yet neither the Great Wall nor the great sacrifice of leam-

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

ing was of much avail: the Chinese were to be a constant prey to more warlike peoples. The qaietist characteristics of the race had indeed become unalterably fixed in the long-ago, their own wars and disputes tending to have a municipal rather than a national char-acter.

China's nearest neighbour in these early times was Korea; and a vast amount of Far Eastern history pivots on this fact. Whilst it is true that Chinese adventurers, sailing down from the Yangtsze estuary, began to get into touch with the Annamese and aboriginal king-doms around Canton soon after the Christian era, the land routes southwards were still barred by mountainous country, filled with fierce peoples. The Koreans were more docile. Broken up into small communities living in caves, culture was brought to them by Chinese scholars two thousand years ago; and their genius was sufficiently literary to allow them almost immediately to evolve an alphabet of their own for their polysyllabic dialect. That they flourished and grew in numbers rapidly is proved by the fact that they had colonized all the region of Southern Manchuria called the Liaotung fifteen hundred years ago, advancing to within a few miles of Shanhaikwan. Always

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famous as miners, their workings can still be seen in extra-mural Chihli; and so well-known was their quest for the precious metals that Kheraded-Bey, an Arabian traveller of the eighth century, described Silla (Korea) as being rich in gold.

It was the first of the four Manchurian-Mongolian races, who successfully conquered North China and established dynasties, who broke Korea's land-contact with the Chinese. The Kitan Tartars in the year 1012 took the Liaotung peninsula and all the territory west of the Yalu River, driving the Koreans back into their original abode. The present boundaries of Korea were therefore fixed more than nine hundred years ago. The Kitans, who soon penetrated into North China, handed on their sovereignty to another Tartar tribe, the Chin Tartars, who were just as short-lived but established themselves firmly north of the Yel-low River. Then came the Mongol or Yuan dynasty; and when this dynasty was finally expelled by the Mings in the fourteenth cen-tury, the Chinese colonization of Manchuria was greatly developed, with the transference of the national capital from Nanking back to Peking (1412). Just as Chihli and the Mon^ golian border-lands had been settled in previ-

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

ous centuries^ so now did the plains of the Tartars receive in large numbers the Sons of Han.

This Manchurian colonization was, however, limited to the Liaotung, i.e. the country east of the Liao River, and to the districts immedi-ately adjoining it. Beyond — in the mountains and forests — lurked fierce tribes ever ready to raid their peaceful neighbours. The Chinese symbols of conquest were now as in the dim past the mattock and the plough ; their perma-nent posture was one of defence carried on from inside walled cities. In the sixteenth century began their historic struggle with the Manchus, a race of mountaineers living at the foot of the Ever White mountain, who finally repeated the miracle of Kublai Khan and his Tartars and conquered the Empire after a conflict last-ing two generations.

The first census taken by the Manchus in 1651, after the restoration of order, returned China's population at 55 million persons, which is less than the number given in the first census of the Han dynasty, a.d. 1, and about the same as when Kublai Khan established the Mongol dynasty in 1295. Thus we are faced by the amazing fact that, from the beginning of the Christian era, the toll of life taken by

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internecine and frontier wars in China was so great that in spite of all territorial expansion the population for upwards of sixteen centuries remained more or less stationary. There is in all history no similar record. Now, however, came a vast change. Thus three years after the death of the celebrated Manchu emperor Kang Hsi, in 1720, the population had risen to 125 millions. At the beginning of the reign of the no less illustrious Ch4en Lung (1743) it was returned at 145 millions: towards the end of his reign in 1783 it had doubled and was given as 283 millions. In the reign of Chia Gh4ng (1812) it had risen to 360 millions; be-fore the Taiping Rebellion (1842) it had grown to 413 millions : after that terrible rising it sunk to 261 millions. Thus good government be-tween the years 1651 and 1842 — a period of 191 years — increased China's population from 55 millions to 413 millions, an eightfold growth. It had been left to a foreign race to achieve this surprising result.

n

Who are the Japanese? For political rea-sons the Japanese trace their emperors from a sun-goddess who is supposed to have come

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GENEEAL INTRODUCTION

from Korea in the seventh century b.c. There is a great deal more in myths than is generally supposed, and there is no reason to doubt that the earliest connection between the Asiatic mainland and Southern Japan was expressed in the terms of an armed invasion led by a queen. In any case it is generally accepted that the Japanese are partly descended from a double stream of immigrants who came from the mainland by way of Korea, one stream being Manchu-Korean and the other Mongol; but Baelz, one of the most distinguished investi-^ gators of Japanese origins, finds from the recording of many cephalic indices and from other biometrical data that the strongest strain in the people is undoubtedly Malay.

If you strip off the outer Chinese clothing of both men and women (the kimono is a direct importation from China made during the Tang dynasty) you make a remarkable discovery. The men wear a loin-cloth peculiar to all the water-peoples of the island-groups along the shores of Southern Asia; whilst the women have on what is nothing more or less than the Malay sarong ^ or skirts, and a little sleeveless jacket. Garbed like this and placed on the curved Malay fishing-boats still in use you see the original invaders as they floated up from

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their southern islands on the Kuroshiwo, or black current which washes their shores. In their houses, raised two feet above the ground, you may trace the vestigial remains of the water-house built on piles; and although the Japanese share with the Koreans the habit of removing their shoes indoors and sitting on matted floors, their peculiar wooden clogs, with the separated big toe, are plainly the invention of a barefooted people treading the forest trails, and needing at a moment's notice to be able to free their feet for tree-climbing.

It is necessary to dwell on these details in order to fix well the differences between the Chinese and the Japanese. The Chinese almost from the dawn of history are a race of peaceful cultivators, walling themselves in for defence; the Japanese are a water-people, who become a forest-folk and who hunt and fish and only learn agriculture reluctantly. At the beginning of the Christian era, thinly scattered in the val-leys and along the coasts of their own islands, they had not yet driven out the aborigines we know as the Ainus and warfare against them was constant and intense. Being rude and un-lettered, there are few traces of their early history. But from this dim forest past comes the Japanese torii, that curious structure

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

originally made of tree-trunks — ^which so many mistake for a gateway — which was erected in front of the Sun-Goddess's shrines so that fowls might perch on it and salute at dawn the first rays of the rising sun.^

Chinese history shows that between the years 57 and 247 of our era Japan sent four embas-sies to the Courts of the Han and Wei dynas-ties; but it is not until the sixth century that the light on the relations between Japan and China begins to grow clear. With the spread of Buddhism from across the Yellow Sea came the first real knowledge of the Chinese classics,

iThiB recondite subject has never been properly explored, partly because Japanese scholars are forbidden under dire penalties from exercising their critical faculties and building up a true picture of prehistoric Japan. There is, for instance, no reason to doubt that phallicism not only figured very largely in the primitive Japanese cult but was the basis of the life of the people. The peculiar place of women in the social structure and their ruthless exploitation — ^which is shown in the oflScial method of registration of the children of concubines— father so-and-so, mother unknown — ^has had an important influence on the development of the race and on the present position of Japanese society. Even buahido, which has been made such an internationaf asset, is entirely borrowed, being based on the Chinese work ' San Kuo Chih ', or History of Three Kingdoms — ^the warring period of the third century, when, with the fall of the Han dynasty, China was broken up into small warrior states and the virtues of mounted knighthood became very celebrated.

Thus of things that are really Japanese there remain only the Imperial myths; the torii; tattooing; the loin-cloth; geta, or clogs with divided toes; mound-burial; plurality of wives; the tluitched, raised water-house; phallicism; and the Malay-IndonesiAn liahing-boatB.

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the Japanese written language by means of Chinese ideographs dating only from the sev-enth century. Prior to that there are certain evidences that the peculiar Korean script was fitfully borrowed, although it never really took root.

It is learning, then, that forms the first bridge between China and Japan, and in this learning Buddhism plays a great and impor-tant part. Priests and scholars crossed in great numbers from China, giving religion, which had been hitherto expressed in the crude Shinto forest-rites, a new and more imposing significance. There was a constant stream of immigrants crossing by way of Korea ; Chinese temples begin to be built ; and the result of this cultural intercourse may be gathered from the fact that a census of the Japanese nobility, taken in 814 a.d., indicated 382 Korean and Chinese families against 796 of purely Japa-nese origin. The governmental institutions of China were likewise borrowed, the eight depart-ments of state being copied from the T'ang dynasty in China, which is famous in Japanese annals for its civilizing influence. At the begin-ning of the eighth century the first Japanese capital was built at Nara on the accepted Chi-nese plan of a metropolis, with nine gates and

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

nine avenuesy the palace being placed in the northern section and approached by a broad straight avenue dividing the city into two per-fectly equal parts. During the ensuing cen-taries Japan was completely transformed by the adoption of Chinese civilization, foppish-ness in dress and a great growth of luxury distinguishing the period. That Chinese suzerainty was admitted is not disputed, China enjoying under the T^ang a greater cultural supremacy in Eastern Asia than ever before or since.^

So it lasted for more than three hundred years. Then a great change took place in the character of Japan owing to the feudal era, which was brought about by the struggle for power between leading families and by the intensified warfare with the Ainu barbarians. A certain Yorimoto in the twelfth century first obtained the title of Sei-itai-shogun, (Bar-barian-subduing Generalissimo,) and just as the office of Regent had long been hereditary in the Fujiwara family, who gave the emperors their empresses by prescriptive right, so now did the office of Shogun belong to the Minamoto family, who established a capital at Kamakura.'

iRfigmrding this question of suzerainty see the remarkable ftiets further on. > This title was not a new one : it was the new circumstances

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TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

The result of these facts — that militarism so early acquired a special character having all the strength of an established ritual — tinges all Japanese history, and begins that long dualism in government which still lives on under the present modern Constitution. After a period of Chinese culture, the first characteristics of the race reassert themselves, and the history of the strongest clans becomes the history of Japan. The Court, sinking as Chinese Courts were wont to sink into a purely ceremonial office, is pushed more and more into the back-ground; and rival Shoguns, taking the field against one another and acquiring ever greater strength through the growth of the hereditary warrior-class, split up the country into great fiefs.

Relations with China, which had been cordial and intimate during the formative period, now greatly diminished in cordiality. We know that during the Yuan or Mongol dynasty two expeditions, which failed disastrously, were sent to Japan in order to enforce the claims of suzerainty. This left behind a heritage of hatred which never disappeared. True, under the Ashikaga Shoguns, in the fourteenth, fif-

which made it important. It had been first conferred at the end of the eighth century when Ainu warfare was yery oonstant.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

teenthy and sixteenth centuries, increasing im-portance was attached to trade with China so as to defray the costs of the interminable civil wars. The Ming dynasty, when its capital was at Nanking, was induced, although Japanese piracy was constant, to grant commercial pass-ports to facilitate this intercourse, Japanese sword-blades significantly forming the prin-cipal article in the Japanese export trade. It was at the end of the fourteenth century, when relations had been reopened, after a formal protest by China at the continued piracy prac-tised, that there occurred that remarkable event, the investiture of the Shogun Yoshi-mitsu by a Chinese envoy with a royal diploma and a crown. No event in Japanese his-tory has attracted more attention than this. That the Shogun, who in point of dynastic law was simply the emperor's 'protector', per-formed this act mainly to consolidate his own usurpation seems to-day clear; but the minute and careful regulations which the Ming em-perors issued regarding the tribute vessels from Japan — to prevent armed conspiracies — prove that on the Chinese side there was no doubt about Japanese vassalage. Certain it is that, as the years passed, relations between China and Japan steadily diminished in cor-

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diality, and contact became more and more distant, save in the singalar and supremely important matter of Korea.

in

A glance at the map will show how inevitable it has been that Korea should have played so large a part in the political history of the Far East. The peninsula, which juts out in such an astonishing way, somewhat after the fashion of Italy in Europe, is separated from Japan by only 120 miles of water. If, however, the island of Tsushima, which divides the straits into two channels, is included, as well as smaller islands such as Iki, it may be said that when passing between the two countries land is hardly ever out of sight. This is an impor-tant consideration: in olden times it had political consequences of the most far-reaching nature.

The Chinese claims of suzerainty in Korea had never been disputed. In primitive days, for instance during the T'ang dynasty, the expression of China 's suzerain rights may only have had a fugitive character : yet it was none the less undeniable. The ancient method of a small country admitting suzerainty was simply

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

the dispatch of periodic embassies carrying tribute or gifts, and by this ceremonious act acquiring the right of protection against alien aggression. Korea had sent such missions to her great neighbour, who had given her civiliza-tion, from the time of the Han dynasty: and during the wars between the several Korean kingdoms in the sixth century, Chinese troops had not only participated in the struggle but had driven out the Southern dynasty, which was supported by Japanese warriors, making all Korea nominally a Chinese province.

The period of Tartar domination in North China, first under the Kitan, then under the Chin Tartars, broke up the traditional relation-ship between China and Korea. But no sooner was the Mongol dynasty well-established than it revived the old customs, and received homage, Korea aiding and abetting the expe-ditions against Japan.

Under the Ming dynasty the intimate cere-monious relations between China and Korea were re-established on a firmer basis than ever before ; for in 1392 a new Korean dynasty had arisen, and the first emperor tendered his homage and accepted the Chinese calendar and chronology as a sign of his submission. From then on investiture of the Korean sovereigns

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TRUTH ABOUT CHINA Ax\D JAPAN

was regular and formal, no succession being legitimate until it had Chinese Imperial sanc-tion. Korea became so thoroughly saturated with Chinese culture that the Korean dress of to-day is still based on Ming models; the old Chinese topknot being left on Korean heads when the Manchus conquered Korea in 1637 (before they had entered China) as an act of grace because the Koreans had submitted so promptly.

The great and growing friction between China and Japan which was evident during the Ming period, and which was signalized by Japanese raiders in 1554 landing on the Kiangsu and Chekiang coasts south of the Yangtsze and capturing a number of towns, brought the inevitable result in Korea. Japa-nese- raiding in the peninsula during the six-teenth century became more and more frequent, finally culminating in the great and hideous Hideyoshi expedition, which is such an out-standing feature in Far Eastern, relations that it must be dealt with at some length.

The great commander Hideyoshi, taking ad-vantage of the feudal militarism, had subdued all Japan and by 1592 had massed an immense army of 300,000 which he was determined to use abroad. His original design was undoubt-

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

edly not the conquest of Korea but the conquest of China. Korea was simply the stepping-stone, and had Korea consented to be put to such a use she need never have suffered as she did. The Koreans of the sixteenth century were, however, loyal to their Chinese commit-ments, and just as Belgium of the twentieth century refused to be made a passageway for the German armies into France, so did Korea refuse to allow Hideyoshi a free hand, and des-perately resisted. Her castles and her armies were destroyed one after another, the Japanese advance finally reaching Pingyang, although never going beyond.

It was Korean sea-power which finally saved the nation. The Chinese, to ward off the Japa-nese piratical raids on the Yangtsze coasts, had designed a heavily-timbered ship completely shut in — a sort of floating tank — ^which made it impossible for the dread Japanese swordsmen of those days to board and get to grips with their enemy. The Koreans, whose junk inter-course with China, notably with Shantung and the Liaotung, was constant, had improved on this model and sheathed it with iron scales, mak-ing it look like a turtle. To Korea, curiously enough, belongs the honour of using the first ironclads in history; for with a navy composed

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of such vessels the Korean forces attacked the Japanese transports in Fnsan harbour, and at other points along the Korean coast, and almost completely destroyed them. China, on being appealed to, sent army after army to the rescue of her vassal, and although these troops did not greatly distinguish themselves, their dead-weight added to the Korean forces con-fined the Japanese advance to Pingyang — ^the invaders finally retiring and evacuating Korea in 1598 as a result of their sea-losses and their domestic dissensions. The country had, how-ever, been so terribly ravaged during six long years that it never recovered. The slaughter was so immense that there is shown in Kyoto to this day a mound under which are buried the pickled noses and ears of 35,000 Chinese and Korean troops killed by the clan of Sat-suma.

Now just as the Shogun Yoshimitsu for political purposes had accepted investiture at the hands of a Chinese envoy, so did Hideyoshi after his defeat accept — unknowingly so Japa-nese historians declare — from the Chinese en-voys a document which can have but one mean-ing. So important is its text as an explanation of the nature of the conflict between the two nations — China claiming a cultural supremacy

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

which Japan constantly rejected by force of arms — ^that the text should be read: —

The influence of the holy and divine one (Con-fucius) is widespread; he is honoured and loved wherever the heavens overhang and the earth up-bears. The Imperial command is universal; even as far as the bounds of ocean where the sun rises, there are none who do not obey it.

In ancient Umes our Imperial ancestors bestowed their favours on many lands; the Tortoise knots and the Dragon writing were sent to the limits of far Fusang (Japan), the pure alabaster and the great seal character were granted to the mountains of the submissive country. Thereafter came billowy times when communication was interrupted, but an auspi-cious opportunity has now arrived, when it has pleased us again to address you.

You, Toyotomi Taira Hideyoshi, having estab-lished an Island Kingdom, and knowing the rever-ence due to the Central land, sent to the West an envoy, and with gladness and affection offered your allegiance. On the North you knocked at the barrier of ten thousand li, and earnestly requested to be admitted within our dominions. Your mind is al-ready confirmed in reverent submissiveness. How can we grudge our favour to so great meekness t

We do therefore specially invest you with the dig-nity of King of Japan, and to that intent issue this our commission. Treasure it up carefully. Over the sea we send you a crown and robe, so that you may follow our ancient custom as respects dress. Faith-

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fully defend the frontier of the Empire; let it be your study to act worthily of your position as our minister: practise moderation and self-restraint; cherish gratitude for the Imperial favour so bounti-fully bestowed upon you; change not your fidelity; be humbly guided by our admonitionc; continue al-ways to follow our instructions. Respect this !

Death, however, prevented Hideyoshi from dealing with a matter of great historical inter-est. Other influences were at work demanding close attention.

Already, before this turning-point in Far Eastern history, the white man had suddenly appeared on the scenes and by his presence changed the whole course of events.

IV

In 1542 a Portuguese junk on a voyage from Siam to Macao was blown from her course and fetched up off the coasts of Satsuma province. The mariners were well-received. Great curi-osity was excited by their arquebuses, arms of any sort always delighting the Japanese; and these arquebuses were rapidly copied and used against the Koreans and the Chinese in the Hideyoshi expedition. The Portuguese sailors cai:ried back the tidings of their discovery with

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

them to their missionaries, the great Francis de Xavier landing at the chief Satsuma city, Kagoshima, in 1549.

It would take a volume in itself to describe the direct and indirect consequences of the arrival of the European trader and the Euro-pean priest on Japanese soil. But the net re-sults can be summed up in this way. At first, being desirous of trade, the Christian propa-gandists were accepted by some of the feudal chiefs, for trade and religion in those days marched hand in hand. A great number of con-verts were made on the island of Kyushu, and in spite of some friction all was seemingly well. But when the selfsame Hideyoshi in 1587, prior to his Korean expedition, had carried out thq subjection of Kiushu and the Satsuma clans, he propounded the following five questions to the Jesuits:

"Why and by what authority the propa-gandists had constrained Japanese to become Christian converts? Why they had induced their disciples to overthrow Buddhist temples ; why did they persecute the bonzes; why they ate animals useful to manf Why the Jesuit chiefs allowed merchants of their nation to buy Japanese and to make them slaves in the Indies?"

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The reply given to this questionnaire was deemed unsatisfactory and Hideyoshi issued his famous edict of expulsion. For at least ten years considerations of trade prevented the edict from being carried out, but with the com-ing of Franciscan monks a new phase was reached.

The Franciscans were Spaniards and were rivals of the Portuguese. Established at Manila, where their compatriots carried on a regular trade with Spanish South America, they bitterly disliked the rival order of Jesuits and were determined to humiliate them. The Jesuits, having been placed under a ban, were carrying on their religious observances se-cretly. The Franciscans scouted their methods. In spite of a Papal bull, which put Japan beyond their scope, they persisted in going into the country, penetrating even to Kyoto, which was then the Imperial residence, and making a number of converts. A purely fortuitous act brought their doom. A Spanish galleon, on her way from Manila to South America, drifted on to the rocks and, being very richly laden, was seized as a prize. The pilot, in a last effort to save his vessel, showed the Japanese officers a map of the world and the vast extent of the Spanish dominions. Asked to explain how one

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

country had acquired such sway he made the historic reply: ^^Our kings begin by sending into the countries they wish to conquer mis-sionaries who induce the people to embrace our religion, and when they have made considerable progress, troops are sent to combine with the new Christians, and then our kings have not much trouble in accomplishing the rest. ' '

On learning this speech Hideyoshi was over-come with fury and ordered still more severe measures. He died before his policy was com-pleted, but the Tokugawa Shogun who suc-ceeded him left nothing to be desired on the pcore of severity. Japan was, however, still torn by civil war, and the foreign question, although urgent, was eclipsed by domestic issues. Conse-quently although another edict of expulsion was issued in 1614, i.e. twenty-seven years after Hideyoshi had taken action, and still another in 1616, it was not until 1638 that the final act was played. In that year the last remaining group of Japanese Christians, numbering it is said 20,000 fighting men and 17,000 women and children, retired to the promontory of Sbima-bara in the Oulf of Nagasaki. There these insurgents, fighting under flags with red crosses and with battle-cries of Jesus and Maria, were attacked and almost entirely exter^

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minated, and Christianity in Japan disap-peared.

In this last act a Dutch trading-vessel had played a part, assisting the Shogun's forces in the bombardment. The Dutch had been granted a license to trade in 1605. They pos-sessed precisely the qualifications suited to the situation then existing in Japan: they had com-mercial potentialities without any religious as-sociations: and when the Spaniards and Por-tuguese had been entirely expelled the field was left entirely to them — the island of Deshima in Nagasaki, which was not more than three hundred yards long, being the sole window left open to the world. Every kind of indignity was, however, imposed upon the Dutch. No Dutchman could be buried on Japanese soil. Every Dutch ship had her rudder, guns, and ammunition removed, and her sails sealed, and no religious service of any sort could be held; and this condition of affairs existed for a period of 217 years, until the coming of Perry. Not only this, but no Japanese might build vessels capable of navi-gating the high seas. The Japanese, foiled in Korea and fearful of the empires of the West, had irrevocably sealed themselves up.

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

There is in all history no such singular denouement to the double policy Hideyoshi had inaugurated. A complete consolidation of the forces of feudalism now followed the failure of foreign conquest; and it is very important to realize how much all this has affected the char-acter of the Japanese, and how during the last three decades they have attempted to do what they failed to accomplish three centuries ago.

Thrown back on themselves, their innate char-acteristics became intensified — ^they became more and more like themselves. With minute and voluminous regulations governing every activity; with the guards of the feudal lords on every highway, making travel from one fief to another impossible save under special license; entirely cut off from the outer world, and hav-ing no connection even with Korea save what the Daimyo of Tsushima might do by almost stealth at the tiny Pusan settlement, Japan in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was further from China than she was from Europe and America, since the Dutch traders at Deshima were at least a connecting link with the West. There was indeed no single exchange of documents or any species of intercourse

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between China and Japan from the proclama-tion of the Manchu dynasty in Peking in 1644 until the commercial treaty of Tientsin of 1871.

It is necessary to consider this matter from a special point of view.

Whilst the Ming emperors did not greatly welcome the first appearance of Western navi-gators in their seas in 1518 — i.e. twenty-six years before they reached Japan — ^no direct action was taken by them until the savagery of the Portuguese trading-crews and their raids into the country in search of women spread alarm and led to popular reprisals. Then only was intercourse confined to Macao and Canton, and a policy of control inaugu-rated.

Canton was well-fitted to maintain trade re-lations with unknown nations. Originally founded by Chinese sea-adventurers, who had sailed down the Chinese coasts and forced their way into the small aboriginal kingdoms during the first centuries of the Christian era, it had not been formally incorporated in the Empire until the T*ang dynasty (a.d. 618-907). In the eighth and ninth centuries the spread of Islamism had brought Arab navi-gators to the uttermost East, and soon Chinese

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GENERAL INTRODUCTION

vessels, although generally going not further than the Malacca Straits, journeyed as far as Africa and the Indies. Marco Polo himself at the end of the thirteenth century, when he left the land of Cathay after his remarkable so-journ at the Court of Kublai Khan, sailed from Amoy, in the southern province of Fuhkien, for the Persian Oulf in a Chinese deep-sea junk of which he says : —

And first let us ipeak of the ships in which mer-chants go to and fro amongst the Isles of India. These ships, you must know, are of fir timber. They have but one deck, though each of them contains some fifty or sixty cabins wherein the merchants abide greatly at their ease, every man having one to himself. The ship hath but one rudder, but it hath four masts; and sometimes they have two addi-tional masts, which they ship and unship at pleasure. Each of these great ships requires at least 200 mariners, some of them 300. They are indeed of great size, for one ship shall carry 5,000 or 6,000 bas-kets of pepper, and they used to be formerly larger than they are now. . . .

The Cantonese and other South Chinese were therefore very familiar with foreign things; their argosies had long dotted the seas of the Malay archipelago when the first conquista-dares passed through the Malacca Straits and

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

reached out for the Yellow seas; and until atrocities and arquebuses became synonymous terms the fair-faced foreigners were not re-stricted.

Here we have in a single sentence the his-tory of two centuries of Euro-Chinese inter-course. The traders of Canton were not like the historic burghers of Calais who were forced to surrender the keys of their city to an alien conqueror: they merely adapted themselves to the exigencies of the hour and secured a trade monopoly by inaugurating and stereotyping a mercantile system which greatly resembled the system of medieval Europe. The emporia at Canton and at the adjacent port of Macao com-pletely supplied the wants of buyers and sell-ers : in China, unlike Japan, there was no fear of foreign conquest — restriction was simply a police measure.

In religion as in commerce there is much the same story. Matteo Ricci, the first Jesuit to establish himself in China, came to Canton in 1581 and reached Peking twenty years later. He was then an accomplished Chinese scholar, and was duly presented to the Ming emperor Wan Li, who greatly welcomed him. When the Manchu cavalry entered Peking in 1644 as a result of treachery at the Great Wall and the

30

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Mmgs disappeared, the Jesuit Fathers were so jGnnly entrenched and had so many thousands of converts that they were fully accepted by the new dynasty — ^just as the Greek Patri-archate was accepted by the Turks after the conquest of Constantinople. It was a question of national discipline, ancestor-worship, which finally brought conflict, the rival monastic orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans refusing to accept the complaisance of the Jesuits and calling the practice idolatry. The matter was referred to the Popes and there were conflicting rulings. In the year 1700 the great emperor Kang Hsi definitely proclaimed that **the customs of China are political'* — meaning that ancestor-worship was part of the national discipline and must be maintained; and although the Popes dissented and hurled anathemas at all who tolerated the practice, it was not until 1724 — that is, after a century and a half of close religious intercourse — that an edict of expulsion was issued in Peking and only partially obeyed. The early nineteenth century indeed found Catholic missionaries still working in China in secret, and they were the first Europeans to penetrate Korea. They were indeed part and parcel of the external forces which were forcing open China, and

31

TBUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

I

when the first Japanese treaty of 1871 was signed with China, missionaries of all denomi-nations had been commonplaces for two genera-tions.

VI

Adequately to treat this critical period of history — the renewal of direct and formal inter-course between China and Japan late in the nineteenth century, as a result of the opening of the two countries by the military action of the West — requires what is entirely missing, namely, a critical and authentic monograph on the statesman Li Hung Chang, who, until the outbreak of the war over Korea in 1894, so largely controlled the foreign relations of Peking. We do not yet know the things we require to know; we are still in the dark. The handling of evidence, the assignment of pro-portion, the testing of policy — all these things, difficult enough in the case of Western states-men, become doubly so when Oriental statecraft is mixed with European issues, and the whole hidden in the twilight of an old-fashioned Yamen. Brought in 1870 to the gateway of the capital (for Tientsin is the gateway to Peking) as metropolitan viceroy and High Conunissioner for Trade in the Northern Seas, Li Hung Chang

32

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

had behind him all the prestige he had won by crashing^ with General Gordon's aid, the last despairing efforts of the Taiping rebels. It was his particular duty to contrive ma-chinery to resist foreign pressure; to limit international intercourse to the coastline; and thus to prevent clashes between an ignorant proletariat and a defiant mercantilism. Al-ready the foundations of the Chinese State had be^ so sapped by internal discontent and ex-ternal attacks that very little more was re-quired to bring irreparable dynastic disaster. Japan was then a very small issue : but Korea, infallibly and inevitably, provided the meeting-place for the inherent rivalry between two nations.

In 1868 Japan had informed the Seoul Gov-ernment of the restoration of the Meiji em-peror through the intermediary of the Daimyo of Tsushima ; but her demands for an acknowl-edgment of vassalage had been peremptorily rejected. War might even then have come had it not been for the wisdom of the btatesmen of the Restoration period. The persistent efforts of the Western maritime Powers to enter into trade relations with the Hermit Kingdom had filled the coasts of Korea with alarm almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century,

33

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

and had culminated in the United States send-ing in 1871 a special mission. But the Ameri-can gunboats had been fired upon, and a sharp action had ensued which had resulted in Korean coast forts being captured and destroyed. This gesture was, however, fruit-less, and another decade passed before Western diplomacy intervened again. China was ap-parently indifferent; to this day no one accu-rately knows whether she foresaw what must soon occur.

On Japan, however, American action in Korea had an immediate and powerful reper-cussion; it was borne in on her that not one day should be wasted in delay. Nearly thirty years had now passed since China had been opened by foreign treaties ; nearly twenty since she herself had given effect to Perry *s de-mands. Yet China and Japan were officially not cognizant of each other's existence, and were unrepresented at each other's Court.

In the autumn of 1871 (i.e. four months after the American gunboat affair off Chemulpo) Date, the Japanese Minister of Foreign Affairs, arrived in Tientsin and signed with Li Hung Chang a treaty which materially and radically differed from all other treaties China had made. Its language and its clauses have

34

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

indeed to-day the highest importance ; for they reveal the fact that the first attempt of Japan to accommodate herself to a type of relation-ship alien and antithetical to Eastern culture was made in a spirit of equality. The written, precise agreement, which Europe owes to Ro-man Law, here appears in flowing, ceremonious language; and what should have been from its very nature clearly and absolutely defined from the very beginning is only vaguely touched upon.

Listen to the language.

Article I declares: —

Henceforth the friendship between China and Japan shall be increased and shall last like heaven and earth forever. The countries subject to each state shall in like manner treat each other with respect, and shall commit no acts of hostility towards each other, to the end that everlasting peace may be main-tained.

Article II declares: —

Now that friendly relations subsist between the two countries, this friendship shall without fail be of an intimate and reciprocal character. Should either state experience at the hands of another country injustice or slighting treatment, on communication being made to the other state the latter shall give assistance or shall use her good offices in mediating

35

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

1>etween the two countries. Thus friendship shall be increased.

Article III declares : —

The system of administration and the laws of the two countries being different, each country shall be free to conduct its own administration independently. Neither country shall be permitted to interfere in the concerns of the other and press for the adoption of things prohibited by law. Assistance shall be rendered mutually for the enforcement of laws, and eaeh country shall give orders to its merchants that they must not lead astray the people of the other country or commit any offence whatsoever.

Was there any discussion, it may be asked, about Korea or did both plenipotentiaries avoid the issue! No one knows, for the treaty-makers are dead — and their diaries have been destroyed.

But even more interesting than these general political maxims, in which the two sovereign states dimly take cognizance of each other's existence, are the two articles which give each country extraterritorial rights at ports open to trade where consuls have been stationed, and failing that leave control vn the hands of local officials who are authorized to execute jtAstice after lex loci. China (and the fact has capital importance to-day) possessed in the period

36

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

1871-94 extraterritorial rights in Japan pre-iHsely as Japan possessed extraterritorial rights in China — and it was this question just as much AS the question of Korea which ultimately made an attack on China necessary to Japan.

Article VIII declares : —

Each country shall, in each of the ports of the other country which are open to trade, station a Consul who will exercise control over the merchants of his nationality. All matters relating to property of all kinds, to business or professions, and to judicial suits, shall be referred for settlement to the Consul, who shall decide them according to the laws of his country. Suits arising between merchants of the two countries shall be brought in the form of petitions ; the Consul shall endeavour to settle such cases, and shall do his utmost to prevent them being made the subject of litigation. When a settlement cannot be effected in this manner, the Consul shall act in accordance with justice. In cases of robbery and absconding (where the aggrieved party is an alien), it will be suflScient for the local authorities of each country to arrest the offenders and take back the stolen property; the Oovemment concerned shall in no case be required to make compensation.

Article IX declares: —

Should in any open port of either country no Consul be appointed, the local authorities of the country in

37

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

question shall exercise control over the subjects and trade of the other country, and render good oiSces; should an offence be committed, they shall arrest and try the offender, and after reporting the facts of the case to the Consul at the nearest open port, give sentence according to the law.

By one of those curious ironies which are not rare in history, within three months of its signa-ture the treaty was subjected to an acid test by an incident in the Loochoo Islands. This string of islands, which forms a pendent to the islands of Japan, was for centuries tributary both to China and Japan. But China was the older suzerain. Tribute was first sent to China in A.D. 1372 and to Japan only 1451. The princes of the Loochoos had also received their investiture regularly from the emperors of China since the time of the Ming sovereign Yung Lo (1403-25); but the islands had been conquered by the Prince of Satsuma in 1609 and since that date their princes had received investiture from the emperor of Japan. When in 1871 some Loochoo Islanders were ship-wrecked on the coast of Formosa and killed and eaten by the head-hunters of the mountains, Japan demanded redress for her subjects and China made no counter-claim of suzerainty. Li Hung Chang, however, accepted responsibility

38

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

and undertook the chastisement of the Formo-san savages; but his decision was almost im-mediately reversed by the Peking Government, which declared that the tribes in question acknowledged no overlord. Japan then dis-patched an expedition of 3,000 troops — which caused the Chinese Government once again to change its policy, and claim the sole right to intervene in Formosan affairs. Chinese troops were likewise sent to Formosa and the two coun-tries seemed to be drifting into war ; the inter-vention of the British envoy in Peking effected a stttlement by means of an indemnity. The language of the settlement recorded in Peking on the 31st October, 1874, is important because it was signed by the great Japanese states-man Okubo, who had long specialized in his country *s foreign relations. The preamble says:

. . . Certain Japanese subjects having been wantonly murdered by the unreclaimed savages of Formosa, the Government of Japan regarding these savages as responsible dispatched a force against them to exact satisfaction. An understanding has now been come to with the Government of China that this force shall be withdrawn and certain steps taken; all of which is set forth in the three Articles follow-ing.

39

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

Thus Japan assumes successfully that the people of a principality tributary to both China and Japan are Japanese subjects. This princi-ple, once asserted, henceforth guided all her policy in her contest with her great neighbour;

vn

In 1875 some Japanese sailors were fired upon from the Korean forts which the Americans had destroyed four years previously. Once again the forts were levelled and Japan informed China of her intentions. It was not only Chi-nese claims which were irritating to her but the menace of Russian arms was keenly felt. Not only had Russia, by the use of chicanery, an-nexed in 1860 the whole Pacific province of Man-churia and founded the great city of Vladi-vostok, but she had attempted in 1861 to do what the Mongols under Kublai Khan had done — to occupy the strategic island of Tsushuma, which commands the Korean Straits. China gave Korea friendly advice regarding the estab-lishment of amicable relations, but although Japan sent a dispatch to the Seoul Court proposing a treaty it was rejected. In Feb-ruary, 1876, an ambassador and a divisional general, with the necessary troops, anchored

40

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

off Korea prepared for peace or war — ^and a treaty resulted, characteristically signed by the divisional general, in which the independence of Korea was acknowledged.

What did this signify! How was it possible to reconcile such a declaration with the tribute missions which still regulariy proceeded to Peking and which were a matter of common knowledge! Did it mean that the new-type re-lationship which Western arms had forced on Eastern empires — with written Roman Law agreements — ^must inevitably destroy old cul-tural claims and the old hegemony! No one knows, but it is not mere coincidence that in the year following this treaty Li Hung Chang should have annexed to China the forty-mile neutral strip on the west, or Chinese, bank of the Yalu River, which for centuries had been a No-man's-land, because it lay beyond the old boundary palisade. Plainly the move showed fear — a dim realization that a ** strategic frontier'* was being menaced.

Yet in spite of these things there seems to have been no definite policy regarding the main factor — foreign pressure. In 1881, however, Li Hung Chang wrote a dispatch to the Korean Court advising ** limited treaties" with the Western Powers. In 1882 the United States,

41

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JA^AN

still hankering after proper relations, sent a commodore on board of an American gunboat escorted by three Chinese men-of-war ; and pre-* cisely as Commodore Perry had done a genera-tion before in Tokio Bay, finally signed the first Western treaty.

Immediately after this event we get an im-portant clue. The American treaty had been signed in May: in September Chinese and Korean officials, meeting at Tientsin, come to a written agreement and disclose in a single sentence the real nature of the relationship ex-isting between China and Korea. The preamble to **the Regulations for maritime and overland trade between Chinese and Korean subjects of 1882" begins in this way: —

. . . All that pertains to the relations of Korea as a boundary state of Cliina has been long ago regulated by fixed rules, and no change is required in this respect. But as now foreign countries entertain trade with Korea by water, it becomes necessary to remove at once the prohibition of sea trade hitherto enforced between China and Korea, and let the merchants of both countries participate in all the advantages of commercial relations; the regulations affecting the exchange of produce on the frontier will also, as time may require, be modified ; but the new regulations for the maritime and overland trade now decided upon are understood to apply to the relations between China

42

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

and Korea only, the former country granting to the latter certain advantages as a tributary kingdom, and treaty nations are not to participate therein. It is in this sense that the following Articles have been agreed upon.

At last we see clearly. Korea was a ** bound-ary state" precisely as Annam, Tonking, Siam, Burmah, Tibet, Nepaul, Eastern Turkestan, and the Principalities of Outer Mongolia were boundary states, i.e. buffer territories ruled over by lesser kings. Surrounding the ancient Middle Kingdom, which was looked upon as centre of all things because in the Confucian cosmogony the emperors. Sons of Heaven, were necessarily the High Priests of all who acknowl-edged the sway of Chinese culture, they had a definite and special role to fulfil. It is easy to see that the difficulties facing China in the nineteenth century were the difficulties facing England in India, where for the same reasons, although they were given another name, the Russian advance in Central Asia, which was leading to the absorption of the independent Khanates, menaced the whole buffer-territory theory. China's predicament in Korea was therefore England's predicament in Afghanis-tan; intercourse by water had been absolutely and rigidly cut off even between suzerain and

43

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

tributary because the only method of enforcing a veto in the East is to make it absolute. West-ernism, of which Japan had become a pretended exponent, was destructive of the old sanction. Water was the element which could not be con-trolled. It is water to-day which still remains the master-force in the Far East ...

In 1883 further regulations to control Korean frontier traffic throw further light on an obscure and difficult subject. Chinese and Korean officials, talking to one another in the Liaotung, reveal some of the curiosities of the old relationship. One clause states that *4t being one of the prerogatives of the Court of China to draw its supply of fish for sacrificial purposes from the embouchures of rivers situ-ated on the Chinese side of the Yalu and in the Korean district of Pingyang, the people are strictly forbidden to fish there clandestinely '*. What visions of a long departed past does this not conjure up, the Altar of Heaven and the Temple of Imperial Ancestors in Peking, so many hundreds of miles away, drawing supplies by prescriptive right from this tributary region ! Another clause declares just as unemotionally : ** Whereas all the territory under the jurisdic-tion of the Liaotung is Crown land attached to His Majesty ^s Second Capital and subject to

44

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

the rules which formerly received Imperial sanction, merchants who come for the purchase of local produce can only be allowed, whether coming or going, to pass through the sidegates of the Fenghuang palisade passage; travellers who have been turned back from the tribute-road must not choose roads according to their fancy. ' *

How redolent of the seventeenth century! For **His Majesty's Second Capital" is Mouk-den — the original chief city of the little Manchu principality which after fifty years of struggle had captured Peking. And just as miniatures or skeletons of the great Boards of State are maintained even to this day in Hsianfu, which ceased to be the national capital thirteen cen-turies ago, so was Moukden still spoken of as **the second capital '\ And the palisade which appears so casually — forty miles from the Yalu River — is the old Chinese boundary palisade built by the Ming dynasty in the fifteenth cen-tury to protect Chinese settlers from Manchu raids — where guards were still maintained in ignorance of the old purpose.

By these marks we see something of tragedy which Westemism, sweeping in by the sea, spelt for an old-world empire.

Meanwhile in the capital of Korea this up-

45

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

setting of the time-honoured past was provok-ing as desperate a struggle as it had in Japan during the last days of the Tokugawa Shogunate; the Korean royal family, torn by intrigues, was divided into a so-called conserva-tive pro-Chinese party, led by the ill-fated Queen, and a so-called liberal pro-Japanese party. The destruction of the Japanese Lega-tion and the general mob-violence, induced by the signing of the first foreign treaties in 1882, culminated in the landing of Yuan Shib-kai and other generals with 3,000 Chinese troops to back up the Queen's party. And these were promptly followed by the landing of the same number of Japanese troops.

This meeting of China and Japan face to face after centuries of isolation filled the air with electricity. Instinctively the two nations hated one another. All the jealousy and bad blood of generations seemed to be concentrated in Seoul : and incident followed incident with be-wildering rapidity. In 1884 several thousand Korean and Chinese troops under Yuan Shih-kai attacked one of the palaces which was de-fended by two companies of Japanese infantry. More Chinese and Japanese troops arrive and rumours of war grow. But the pear was not yet ripe ; and accordingly in 1885 the late Prince

46

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Ito proceeds to Tientsin and signs yet another convention with Li Hung Chang.

In this instrument China and Japan mutually undertake to evacuate Korea : they declare that they ** shall respectively accomplish the with-drawal of the whole number of each of their troops, in order to avoid effectively any com-plications between the two countries: the Chinese troops shall embark from Asan; and the Japanese from the port of Chemulpo'*. They also undertake not to send troops with-out giving prior notice. But regarding the es-sential issue, the definition of the true status of Korea, neither is yet ready to commit itself, although in an additional clause they ** mutually agree to invite the King of Korea to instruct and drill a sufficient armed force, that she may herself assure her public security, and to invite him to engage into his service an officer or of-ficers from amongst those of a third Power who shall be entrusted with the instruction of the said force".

Following this, American officers arrive and drill Korean troops for a brief space ; and Eng-land, after a few more months, evacuates Port Hamilton, which she had occupied because Rus-sia seemed about to move south to the **warm water". But the real issue is Yuan Shih-kai

47

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

and the policy of Tientsin. This man, later to aspire to the throne of China, had returned to Seonl as Imperial Resident — ^having induced Li Hung Chang to consent to this cunning step because Japan only possessed a Minister Plenipotentiary.

And so at last the storm is there on the horizon-line; plainly to be seen by those with vision.

vm

China, after the lesson of the Tonkin war with France (1884-85), had commenced the fortifica-tion of Port Arthur under Li Hung Chang's guidance. She likewise vastly improved her navjy which soon included two ironclads and a number of good cruisers, placing the whole under the joint command of a Chinese admiral and a British admiral. But in 1890 the English-man lost his post as the result of a petty dispute — and China's fate in Korea was sealed. Cor-ruption and ineflSciency soon reigned supreme in. the new navy, which might have repeated the performance of the Korean armoured ships of the sixteenth century, but which went into action in 1894 at the Battle of the Yalu with sand-filled shells, and so changed all history.

48

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

Japan's determination to wage war against China came in 1894 — inmiediately she had signed her treaty with Britain abolishing extra-territoriality in Japan. War was held by her a necessary step not only to consummate her international emancipation but to take from China rights which embarrassed her. The facts that follow have supreme importance to-day.

The British treaty abolishing extraterritori-ality was signed on the 16th July, 1894, when events in Korea, due to the so-called Tong Hak rebellion,^ had led to the landing of both Chinese and Japanese troops. The first act of war, the sinking of the chartered transport **Kowshing** carrying Chinese reinforcements by a Japanese cruiser, did not occur until the 25th July, i.e. until nine days after the treaty had duly been signed in London. In other words, Japan was working by time-table on the accepted Prussian model. Land-fighting was delayed until three days later, Japan only issuing her declaration of war on 1st August, having on the 23rd July broken into, and taken possession of, the royal palace and carried off the Queen and her chil-dren, which allowed her to appoint a puppet Regent.

1 Regarding the true explanation of the Tong Hak riling, aee Document G in the Appendix.

49

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

The rest of the Powers quickly followed England's example in the matter of extra-territoriality, and in her greatly improved po-sition among the nations it was essential for Japan that the privileges of extraterritoriality in China — which she did not then possess — should be acquired by her, whilst the exterri-torial jurisdiction China possessed in Japan should be forcibly cancelled.

This is one of the deeper reasons for Japa-nese action in Korea. Although China agreed to the complete independence of Korea almost after her first defeats, Japan was aiming at very different objects. The cession of the Liaotung, or the area included in the old wil-low palisade, plus the annexed Yalu zone, was but one small thing, just as Formosa was another. The real prize was the reversal of the old relationship between China and Japan — that suzerain China should become the tribu-tary and tributary Japan the suzerain. Every-thing else is subordinate to this root-idea. The intervention of Russia and her satellites in 1895, which was followed, by the brutal Japa-nese murder of the Korean Queen and the loss of all Korean influence, and then by the Man-churian war — these and many other things are but interruptions in the grand policy — inter-

50

GENERAL INTRODUCTION

mptions due to necessity and to world-influence. The root-idea to-day, as it has been for many years, is to complete the plan of making suzerain China the tributary and tributary Japan the suzerain.

The curious and intricate character of this crisis which necessitates a double policy — one for the West and another for the East — is ade-quately illustrated in the four chapters that follow.

51

II

CHAPTER 2. 远东大势

THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

The writer can lay claim to an intimate knowl-edge of the Far East and of everything that affects it. Almost his earliest memory of childhood is of a great crowd of many thou-sands of shouting men, stripped to the waist, and armed with hamboo carriers^ poles, who had swarmed forward determined to destroy the house of his father because five square black characters on the door-plate proclaimed that it was the oflScial residence of a commis-sioner — one responsible for the levying of taxes. The salt-tax had just been raised, to pay for the Tonkin war of 1884; and these men, coming on shore from the great fleet of salt-junks which were tied up along miles of the Yangtsze River, were trying to secure a remission by intimidation. Characteristically, they were threatening the wrong authority ; but long experience had taught them that in a country of compromises violence of any sort is effective as a political argument, and that it

52

THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

is better to hit the wrong man rather than no man at all. . . . That was the curious Chi-nese question thrusting itself on his immature attention, a vast question in many ways, yet nevertheless inherently simple, since it is made up of the crudest economic problems, which have not changed throughout the ages.

Since those days of thirty-five years ag% a good deal of water has flowed under the bridges and a good many changes have come. War, and war's alarms, were responsible a quarter-of-a-century ago for the handing-over of China to the international money-lender. With indebtedness came complications and irri-tations. The year 1900 was signalized by that big * blow-out' called the Boxer rising; and the settlement which followed was still further complicated by the complete breakdown in 1905 of the fiction of Russian invincibility which had so obsessed the late Lord Salisbury and the present Lord Lansdowne that to it alone must be traced most of the disasters of our own hectic decade. The fabric of Far Eastern relations having been based on balance-of-power, which is only another name for a refusal to face the inevitable, the declension of Russia destroyed the patchwork scheme, and made one of two things certain — that either

53

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

China must win her complete independence or be carved up.

In 1911 a valiant attempt was made on the part of Young China to secure the first alterna-tive by erecting a republic. But, as the writer has sought to explain in a recent work, the attempt was not a great success mainly because the liberal Powers of the world, being every whit as short-sighted then as they have shown themselves in the case of Eussia, did not love the Chinese Revolution — only tolerating the elimination of the Manchu autocracy because the bondholders' interest in the country was not directly affected. At the earliest possible opportunity they assisted reaction in the per-son of Yuan Shih-kai; subsidized him so that he might destroy all his rivals and the embryo of parliamentary government into the bargain ; and then were mightily surprised that he should have aspired to a burlesque kingship which killed him and left the country pretty well wrecked.

The results of the republican experiment in China, so far as Europe was concerned, were thus counted quite negligible. It was said by professional diplomats, who probably know less about modem politics than any other body of men, and who have been badly frightened

54

THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

all the world over by the rise of popular power, that the Chinese were not fit for self-govern-ment, whatever they may mean; and so when President Li Yuan-hung assumed oflSce in the summer of 1916 the Powers had nothing left in the way of a reconstructive plan excepting to induce China to enter the war, hoping that this act would tide things over, and serve to mask five years' discreditable diplomacy. On 14th August, 1917, China did declare war on the Teutonic Powers — being speeded to take that decision by Viscount Ishii's special mis-sion to the United States, which it was feared had sinister objects. But the Chinese declara-tion was stripped of half its international sig-nificance because the country was once more at war with itself — North facing South, and each side declaring that the other was a rebel and seeking by force of arms to subdue it. And as this kind of provincial militarism has become just as much the enemy in China as Kaiserism has been in Europe, it is well carefully to con-sider it.

The modem army of China is the child of the collapse of 1900. It is true that prior to the Boxor explosion a few 'model' divisions had already been organized as a result of the disastrous Japanese war of 1894-95. There

55

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

was, for instance, one division of Northern troops under a General Nieh which, although the fact has never been properly chronicled, fought with the utmost gallantry against the international armies around Tientsin, advanc-ing against entrenched positions until it was almost entirely destroyed. • There were also some well-trained troops at Nanking and Han-kow, and above all there was Yuan Shih-kai's picked division in Shantung.

It was this division which was the germ of the modern Chinese army. When the fugitive Empress Dowager Tsu Hsi and the Emperor Kwang Hsu returned to Peking from far-off Hsianfu in 1902, and sanctioned Yuan Shih-kai's scheme for a National Army, events marched so rapidly — for Asia at least— that by 1905 Yuan Shih-kai as viceroy of the metro-politan province of Chihli and chief of the Army Board was able to hold army manoeuvres in which 100,000 well-trained men participated.

At the time this created a great sensation: it was felt by all far-seeing men that Yuan Shih-kai was deliberately raising a force to take the place of the Eight Banners, or Manchu army-corps, which had been the means of effecting the Manchu conquest of China in the ieventeenth century and whose organization—

56

THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR BAST

on paper — survived although the men were entirely worthless and unequipped. Japan, who had just beaten Buasia in her Manchurian war, began tp realize anew that China was not really a negligible quantity, and that given an army and navy of even moderate efficiency China could re-establish the Far Eastern situa-tion which had existed prior to the Korean war of 1894. The writer believes that a portion of the astonishing diplomatic story which has been enacted in Peking in the period 1914-18 is due to this one fact — ^namely, the Japanese fear of a militant China.

Had the revolution of 1911 not created an interregnum, the modern Chinese army would have reached its full authorized establishment (thirty-six field divisions with a peace-footing of half-a-million men and a war-footing of something over a million) at about the time of the commencement of the World War. But the revolution broke up the reorganization scheme long before it was completed ; mixed the old-style and the new troops; and by lowering the standard and introducing politics into the army destroyed unity and discipline.

What Gambetta found in clericalism repub-lican China indeed soon discovered in her militarists. The army, reinforced by myriads

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TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

of men who had managed to acquire firearms, was plainly the enemy; for the soldiers openly declared that they had made the revolution, and that without them the revolutionary lead-ers could not have lived an hour. This was unfortunately only half the truth and therefore as dangerous as all half-truths inherently are. For the revolution was as much the work of the foreigner as it was of the Chinese. The Manchus could never have been dethroned had their borrowing-power on foreign markets not been deliberately cancelled by the action of foreign diplomacy, which yielding to the clamour of publicists declared that the Western world would maintain strict neutrality until a decision was reached. Consequently, the army in spite of its boast was really dependent on an alien paymaster who could only be reached by a method which its leader and creator — Yuan Shih-kai — ^had brought to a fine art. This method was a mixture of bluflf, promises to rival legations, and threats — above all, threats that if hard cash were not forthcoming all China would go up in flames. By finding the monthly quotas for the troops Yuan Shih-kai became supreme.

Only on the surface, however. For the army had become contumacious even before the

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

Manchus had abdicated. Its Northern leaders, roughly grouped together under the name of the Peiyang Party — Anglice, the party of the Northern seas or, better, the Northern vice-royalties — ^had nearly all risen from humble captaincies in Yuan Shih-kai's original model corps (organized in 1896 after the Korean war) to divisional conmiands; and one and all they coveted the direct control of provinces. In other words, the revolution, having abolished the viceroys, who had ruled over single or linked provinces, and substituted the Tu-tuh (now Tu-chun) or military governor for each province, the aim of all these men was to rule at the provincial capitals where provincial taxation was centred and where money neces-sarily was to be found.

By the use of terrorist methods, which com-menced in Peking on the memorable 29th Feb-ruary, 1912, when the capital was sacked by the Third Division, these divisional conmiand-ers soon became the most solid factors in the very fluid po5f-revolutionary China. Com-mander after commander received as reward for fealty to Yuan Shih-kai the gift of a pro-vincial capital; and although a parliament or assembly of some kind has been in session in Peking most of the time, such real power as

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TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

there has been since 1911 has been divided among these men.

Nevertheless, the idea of constitutionalism — and the necessity of civil rule being made supreme — ^has never perished. That idea is stronger to-day than it has ever been before — it is the goal all educated Chinese in their heart of hearts are determined to attain. And he-cause civil rule as opposed to militarism is the proclaimed object of the South-Westem group of revolting provinces with their capital at Canton, let us see precisely how the matter stands.

The struggle between North and South in China is very old. In one form or another it has gone on for eight hundred years— in fact ever since the Kitan and Chin Tartars burst through the Great Wall in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and commenced the Tartar military supremacy in North China which has so profoundly modified the old Chinese ritual of government. For although the Ming dynasty (Chinese) broke the Mongol supremacy, and moved the capital from Nanking to Peking five hundred years ago, the Mings were soon enough ousted by the Manchus (Tartars again), who stereotyped nearly three centuries ago the con-ception of a military domination directed frqm

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

Peking — a domination which, no matter how unreal it may have become, still lives in North-em China as a political concept, tradition play-ing such a powerful role among the educated and uneiducated alike that no amount of argu-ment can kill it. This, then, is the real quar-rel between North and South in spite of all talk about constitutionalism, — namely, that the Peking tradition of a military domination has not been killed and cannot be killed until uni-versal education has definitely relegated it to the limbo of forgotten things.

From the beginning of the revolution — that is, from October, 1911 — the Northern army was not only filled with this tradition but was con-scious of its strength. A number of the North-em provinces had so far completed their re-organization that Yuan Shih-kai at the time of the Manchu abdication had certainly a quarter-of-a-million fairly well-found troops under his direct orders. South of the Yangtsze the situa-tion was very different. Some provinces had no more than mixed brigades of reorganized troops ; and although five Southern provinces — Hupeh, Kiangsi, Chekiang, Kwangtung, and Yunnan — could each muster at least one good modem division with artillery and transport, they were without proper arsenals and were

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vastly outnumbered by swarms of old levies. Moreover, all the machinery of army adminis-tration, as well as all the reserves of arms and ammunition, were under the control of Peking ; and when we add that the borrowing-power had been inherited by those who were ten minutes from Legation Street, it will be seen that the odds could not but be heavily in favour of the North.

Nevertheless the South remained determined regarding the necessity of substituting effective parliamentary government for military dicta-tion. The Southern leaders, of course, knew that they had not really won in 1912 when the infant emperor Hsuan-Tung abdicated, and that the big battle had yet to be fought. The abdication had been due primarily to Yuan Shih-kai, who was influenced by three things — hatred of a dynasty that had desired his blood; ambition to rule the nation himself; and an inveterate habit of following foreign opinion because that opinion controlled the stock mar-kets on which China had lived for twenty years. Consequently, when the Manchus had been eliminated, there remained for him two con-trolling impulses and only two— his ambition and the foreign money-market. Everything else — ^parliament, people, and provincial capi-

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

tals — was for him mere shadow-play and not reality. It is only when the problem is thus envisaged that what took place can be under-stood.

In the spring of 1913, i.e. considerably more than a year later than it should have occurred, the first republican parliament with a large Southern majority met in Peking in spite of the assassination of their leader Sung Chiao-jen at Shanghai under Yuan Shih-kai's orders. Not only was there this majority, but by virtue of the provisional constitution, which was the law of the land, the Southern leaders believed that they could effectively control Yuan Shih-kai by reducing him to a figurehead. Quickly disillunionized by his signature without par-liamentary endorsement of the great Reorgani-zation Loan, which gave him the one thing he needed to secure open mastery — money, they nevertheless held to their point for several months, only inciting open rebellion in the end because they saw that force was still the only argument.

This trumpery affair of July and August, 1913, commonly called the Second Revolution, which was over in a few weeks thanks to the military strength of the North, further weak-ened the South by allowing the Northern divi-

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sional generals, who had hitherto not been in ofiSce south of the Yangtsze, to occupy the whole line of provincial capitals running from Wuchang (Hankow) to the sea. By the end of the revolt the North was therefore considerably stronger than it had been in 1912. Not only were fourteen out of twenty-one provinces openly in its hand — forming a solid block of territory from the Amur to a point south of Shanghai — but portions of the remaining seven provinces were menaced, making the Southern outlook as black as it could be.

Had Yuan Shih-kai not yielded to the last of the three impulses which had dictated his entire policy from 1911 — tis ambition — he would pos-sibly be alive to-day as ruler of a very cen-tralized and very bureaucratic commonwealth. But in 1915, yielding to the importunities of his family circle and of his friends — who declared that the moment had arrived for the substitu-tion of a legalized regime for his de facto dictatorship — he gave his consent for the mon-archy movement and thereby signed his death-warrant.

There is even to-day a controversy among scholars as to precisely why there should have been such a pother about his attempting to do what so many Chinese had successfully done

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

in their four thousand years of written history. From the beginning of time — that is, from the days of Yao and Shun, who are said to have flourished long before the Tartar shepherd kings, the Hyksos, invaded Egypt (2000 b.c.) — Chinese citizens have been upsetting old dynas-ties and making new ones. The right which the early emperors had of nominating anyone they pleased as successor — the doctrine of the blodd royal being unknown — was held to be good war-rant for an illustrious minister mounting the Dragon Throne, the Imperial yellow signifying a priestship rather than a military kingship. Yuan Shih-kai^s friends indeed declared that really constitutional monarchy, in which Chi-nese thought and Western political thought would be iiiipartially mixed^ would kill the Tartar-military taint attaching to Peking, and bring national contentment. But his enemies retorted that not only was his sanction of such a scheme deliberate treachery — ^and the revela-tions since made regarding the so-called na-tional referendum certainly disclose unblushing fraud — ^but that what he aimed at was simply the selfsame family rule, with all its corruption and sycophancy made ten times worse with the help of well-trained men — who would have the skill of scientific criminals. Moreover, those

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in touch with political life were assured that since Yuan Shih-kai had rejected the Japanese protectorate which Mr. Hioki, the Japanese plenipotentiary, had offered him at the time of the Twenty-one Demands (18th January, 1915), Japan would certainly defeat his plan by hook or crook. Consequently, the outbreak of the so-called Third Revolution on Christmas Day, 1915, this time not on the Yangtsze but in the inaccessible province of Yunnan, foreshadowed his fall, since even the Northern generals re-fused to support him generally.

On the 6th June, 1916, Yuan Shih-kai died a broken-hearted man. The South once more was jubilant, declaring that at last it had won. But in 1916 as in 1912 it was not really a vic-tory for the Southern party : it was a qualified victory for certain Southern military leaders in certain Southern provinces, Tsai-ao, the brilliant young Yunnan leader, who had done all the fighting, dying before he could consoli-date his gains and make his weight really felt. Vice-President Li Yuan-hung, who now assumed office as President, although a thor-oughly honest man, was a mere hostage in Peking without a single soldier from his na-tive province of Hupeh to support him. It re-quired the revplt of the whole navy to force

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

the Northern ifiilitary party to agree even to the restoration of the provisional Constitution and the re-convocation of the dissolved Parlia-ment of 1913 ; and, therefore, under the surface, when Parliament reassembled it was simply the situation of 1913 over again, minus Yuan Shih-kai. When the war-issue came up early in 1917, owing to America's invitation to China to join in the battle against submarine piracy, the question of the permanent Constitution had already nearly wrecked Parliament, the South-ern majority not being suflScient to force through the vital clauses. Consequently, just as Yuan Shih-kai had used the signature of the great Reorganization Loan to break the power of Parliament in 1913, so in 1917 the Northern Party began to use the question of a declara-tion of war against Germany as an intimidation against the majority party, being greatly forti-fied by the attitude of the Allied legations, who so greatly desired that step to be taken that everything else was held immaterial.

Thereupon began an extraordinary struggle. President Li Yuan-hung seemed to have it in his hands not only to settle the constitutional question by a display of firmness but to define once and for all China's foreign policy. But, being without competent help and without

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troops, his nerve failed him at tlfe psychological moment ; and illegally he dissolved Parliament after diplomatic relations with Germany had been broken off, but before any formal declara-tion of war had been made. At the same time adding folly to his great mistake, he had called to Peking the illiterate General Chang Hsiin, who carried out a burlesque restoration of the Manchus — a mockery which was dissipated by a brief fusillade. The result was to leave North and South worse divided than ever ; the North-ern military party being once more in firm control of Peking, whilst the fugitive South-erners were once more forced back to the home of the Revolution — Canton. For eighteen months the situation has continued like that, with fitful fighting along the northern edge of the seven south-western provinces, and with the foreign Powers looking on helplessly and wondering whether it would ever end.

Whilst the expression **the foreign Powers*' is still in general use to signify the whole group of nations in treaty relations with China, recent events have proved that the proper way of expressing foreign political activities should be *Hhe foreign Powers and Japan''. For al-though Japan is an ally of the Allies, and although since her first treaty of alliance with

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

England in 1902, in which Chinese integrity was so carefully guaranteed, she has repeatedly exchanged agreements, notes, secret memo-randa, and what not with half the Powers of Christendom, aflBrming the selfsame principles, her Chinese policy is as purely a Japanese product as are the geta (wooden clogs) of the Japanese people. That policy clatters noisily along the international highroad just as if it were shod in resonant geta so that everyone can see and hear it; but every so often the clogs are slipped oflf and Japan enters her neighbour's house in her stockinged feet (as good manners demand) ; and then very secretly behind the shoji (screens) she whispers that unless her tutelage is accepted it will be highly unfortunate for China.

It would be mere repetition of things already outlined to re-examine the problem of the Chi-nese Revolution from the Japanese standpoint. But this at least ought to be said : that nothing which has occurred in the Far East since the Perry expedition of sixty years ago has more disconcerted Japan than the institution of re-publicanism at her very doors. Having with vast difficulty and trouble adjusted her national life to the requirements of the modern world from the time of the Restoration of 1868 to the

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Treaty of Portsmouth of 1905, she viewed with real horror Westemism sweeping in on China like a torrent and threatening entirely to cap-ture it under the name of Democracy. For the isolation which existed under the Tokugawa Shogunate for two and half centuries still lives spiritually in Japan: Japanese national life remains a curious compound of adjustments and half-tones, a rather delicate thing that like a hothouse plant might easily be blasted if left exposed to the cold winds of Reason. To pre-serve in the second decennium of the twentieth century not only a belief in the divine right of kings, but to propagate oflBcially in every school, in every college, and in every univer-sity of the land the cult of the actual divinity of the Emperor, emphatically necessitates a juggling with the problems of the other world of an almost fantastic nature. In the writer's belief the secret of Japanese diplomacy may be traced to this unreal foundation of government, which is further complicated by the haunting conviction that the Western races are really stronger, more virile, and more eflBcient than the races of the East and must infallibly dominate them whenever it comes to an open trial of strength. And if we take this hy-pothesis as a starting-point obscurity vanishes.

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

Let us explain. Already after the Russo-Japanese War — i.e. fourteen years ago — all classes of Japanese knew that their material development was wholly insuflBcient for the fierce competition of the modern world, and that Russia had really been defeated by a miracle. Crushed by taxation to pay the war debt incurred, the Japanese people instinctively favoured a double policy — the exploitation of China for her raw products and the stimulating of Chinese opinion in such a way as to secure, if not the union of the yellow races, at least the general acceptance of the idea that inter-nationally the Far East must be considered as one entity under the hegemony of Japan.

It was when Japanese people were in this mood that the Knox Neutralization scheme of the Manchurian railways was presented to the world (1908) as a solution for the political-territorial tangle which the Russian war had left. That such a proposal, in the circum-stances narrated, should have struck the Japa-nese people much as the Kaiser's telegram to Kruger struck the British people at the time of the South African imbroglio is not at all sur-prising. It was looked upon as unwarranted interference, almost as an aflfront. For there was the diplomatic record of the days prior to

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V ««.•<. .

TRUTH ABOUT CHINA AND JAPAN

the Manchurian war to prove that Japan had deliberately and categorically offered to ab-stain from all interference in Manchuria if Bussia would enter into a similar conunitment regarding Korea. The fact that the Japanese had been forced to fight a ruinous war, with no real margin of safety either on land or on sea, because that offer had been refused, in their opinion entitled them to a consideration which the jealous Western world was not giving them. It is necessary to insist upon this half-forgotten matter even to the point of weariness, as it is the secret of much tortuous diplomacy. For when the Neutralization scheme fell through, and Japan found the alternative plan for a parallel railway (the Chinchow-Aigun trunk-line) being pushed by British and American interests in 1909, she became convinced that a new battle had already commenced having for object her economic restriction on the Asiatic mainland. And although the formal annexa-tion of Korea was successfully accomplished in 1910, in 1911 the British Government insisted on a revision of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, inserting a clause which made the in-applicability of that instrument to America absolutely clear. It was with these things weighing heavily on

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

Japan that the Manchu abdication of Febru-ary, 1912, came — after a British refusal to countenance armed force being lent to retain the dynasty. And when it was plainly shown that Yuan Shih-kai, who for quarter-of-a-cen-tury had been the arch-enemy of the Tokio Government, was being supported by all the Western Powers alike as an instrument to con-tinue the politico-financial policy of the pre-abdication days, every group of Japanese be-came convinced of the necessity of drastic action.

The outbreak of the World War gave the needed opportunity. Japan consented to de-clare war on Germany only on her own con-ditions. The mishandling of the Tsingtao question by the Allies — the British Govern-ment, for instance, could easily have induced Yuan Shih-kai to deliver a twenty-four hours' ultimatum on Germany to evaculate Chinese soil, since the President of China had 50,000 troops almost at Tsingtao 's back doors — al-lowed Japan to make war as if by favour, using the belligerent conditions throughout the world to hasten on a policy which had nothing to do with the issues being so savagely fought out on European soil. And when Yuan Shih-kai, tardily recovering from the surprise into .which

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he had been thrown by the international catas-trophe, declared a war-zone in Shantung prov-ince so as to restrict the Japanese military effort, and then cancelled that zone as soon as Tsingtao had been captured, Japanese irrita-tion reached such a point that they were forced to action.

On the 18th January, 1915, they accordingly served their famous Twenty-one Demands on him ; and although a violent press defensive did something to mitigate the terms, (Group V, which was the outline of a Japanese protec-torate being withdrawn,) by means of an ulti-matum they forced through all the Manchurian and Shautung articles, with many other valu-able closed-door privileges which will be later the cause of international conflict.

Yet even this left Japan dissatisfied : she was still fearful that China would enter the war and thereby regain a certain liberty of action. The direct efforts the Tokio Government made at the end of the year 1915 to prevent such a consummation were followed in 1916 by direct efforts abroad to improve Japan's interna-tional standing. It was naturally at Petrograd that Japanese diplomacy first set to work ; and as the Bolshevist publication of the Secret Treaties has shown, the Japanese succeeded so

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THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

well that in 1916 they wrote a reinsurance of their China policy with Russia aimed at any third Power who might wish to oppose their China schemes.

But the Russian Revolution totally destroyed the value of this undertaking, whilst almost at the same time China, invited by America to do so, in a most surprising and unexpected way broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, and was on the eve of a formal declaration of war. Seeing the prize once more slipping through their fingers, the Terauchi Ministry developed in the late spring of 1917 a new policy.

Deliberately they associated themselves with the Peiyang military party, promising every kind of financial support if this party would fight under their banner. Nominally acquies-cent, the Peiyang party, in spite of the odium cast on them by their Southern adversaries, were still first and last Chinese, i.e. men who knew perfectly well what Japan's plans really were, and who only pretended that they were in entire accord ^vith them. Thus once more there was a play within the play, the number of factors involved being so immense that most people soon lost sight of the main issue — which was that Japan was for the time being

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merely concentrating on one matter, i.e. push-ing Peking to pawn every liquid asset so that Tokio's claims would be so overwhelmingly strong that when it came to a settlement of the Far Eastern question her wishes would be law.

It was under these auspices that Viscount Ishii sailed for the United States, a signal for the keen-witted that things were still deemed unsatisfactory by the Tokio Government and that the last refractory element must be forced into the melting-pot. Finding that two months * sojourn in Washington yielded no tangible re-sults, the Japanese Special Envoy became al-most desperate. Then followed a brief and curious departure for New Yor|f, with a brief and curious return to Washington, resulting in the Lansing-Ishii Notes of the 2d November, 1917. That this exchange of notes was very largely prompted by the reports of serious de-velopments of Japanese policy if nothing were done to placate Japanese public opinion, there can to-day be no doubt. The manner in which German emissaries were constantly attempting to enter into relations with Japan — notably at the Scandinavian capitals — is well-known to those behind the scenes; and although Japan remained loyal in word and in deed djiring this

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dangerous pause in the World War, that temp-tations of an extraordinary character were dangled before her eyes is an undisputed fact.

And yet even these Notes, with their un-tenable doctrine of geographical propinquity, did not capture will-o'-the-wisp China. They assisted, no doubt, in the promotion of the pe-culiar Japanese policy of the period 1917-18, when so many hundreds of millions of dollars were lent to the Peking Government on ruinous terms to be squandered on a meaningless civil war; but internationally they were failures. England, still the chief Western Power in East-ern Asia, did not recede from the position she took up in her treaty of 1911 — that she pos-sessed special interests in China as well as Japan, and that these special interests, British as well as the Japanese special interests, must be maintained. This is a very important fact which has never been given its proper impor-tance: it is a fact which even now troubles Japan.

And then at last Bolshevism, invading Asiatic Russia in the spring of 1918, brought a new complication ; for although there never was any German menace to the Far East as Japa-nese agents declared, there was certainly a menace to Japanese plans. In the long story

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of the intrigues and counter-intrigaes at Har-bin — during the first half of 1918 — in which Japan characteristically backed the reactionary General Horvath, master of the Chioese East-em Railway, in order to gain control of the railway — we see a fire being fanned to a blaze so as to allow deft fingers to secare the chest-nuts. Had the reactionary Russian element in the Russian Far East, and among the Cossack communities of Transbaikalia, not been incited to attack the Bolshevists, there would not have been any of the complications which still await solution.

But Japan required frontier warfare, since these activities on the rim of Northern Man-churia allowed her to force through the Sino-Japanese Military Secret Agreement which seemed to bind the Peking Government to her chariot-wheel for the term of the war ; and al-though the astute use made by the United States of the Czecho-Slovak impasse finally brought Allied intervention at Vladivostok and prevented the fruition of the full plan, wliich was the Japanese military occupation of every-thing east of Lake Baikal, it is necessary to note that Japan has acted independently, in spite of the Allies, in Northern Manchuria, in Transbaikalia, and in the Amur province, and 78

THE OUTLINE OF THE FAR EAST

is to-day virtual master of Harbin, of Chita, and of Blavovestchensk.^

Here we must pause, for the involved outline is now complete. How the Chinese imbroglio is to be solved, how a reasonable balance is to be reconstituted for the whole Far East, and peace thereby assured — these things must be separately treated, since they are every whit as complicated as this discussion which has only touched the fringe of the subject.

*The very latest movement, the Pan-Mongolian movement led by the Cossack-Bur iat leader Semenoff from Chita, is believed to be the work of Japanese agents. Evidence is accumulating that Japan has followed a set plan since 1917.

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in

CHAPTER 3. 中国问题的解决

THE SETTLEMENT OF THE CHINESE

QUESTION

In an initial essay the writer traced the gen-eral outline of the problem as it appeared to him from an intensive study conducted on the spot; and although exception may be taken to some of the conclusions he arrived at, it should be carefully noted that these conclusions are to-day the common possession of every un-biassed political student in Eastern Asia who is able to think of the Chinese as normal hu-man beings and who does not deny that they are entitled to international justice.

Two grand facts should emerge from the analysis made; first, that although China has officially and publicly thrown overboard not only her ancient civilization but her system of government, she has not yet succeeded in sub-stituting anything more solid than the theory of Western practice; secondly, that Japan, fol-lowing the path of empire that other virile nations have pursued in the past, and believing that the World War has entitled her to a cer-

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tain local primacy, is pushing deeper and deeper into Continentalism and aspiring more and more openly to the political, commercial, industrial, and military hegemony of all East-ern Asia. The question which at once arises is — can these two facts be reconciled; that is, is it possible for the rebirth of China to be consummated in the face of the imperialistic ambitions of her neighbour? The answer is both yes and no: yes, if the dominant factor in the situation, the maritime Powers, adopt the right policy ; no, if instead of enforcing an honest and well-balanced judgment on an ad-mittedly complex and exasperating situation, they follow Pontius Pilate and wash their hands of the whole business.

We have said the maritime Powers — why the maritime Powers?

All the world knows that the British Treaty of Nanking of 1842 and the Perry expedition of 1853 broke up the ancient seclusion of China and Japan and introduced these two countries anew to one another, besides introducing them to Western civilization. But all the world does not know that, dating from this period of seventy years ago, the action of the whole group of maritime Powers, including even the smallest Western nations such as Portugal and

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Denmark, followed more or less consistent line^ under British-American leadership, until the collapse of China in the Korean war destroyed what was sound and creditable in the past rec-ord; and by putting the maritime Powers ashore in leased territories and spheres of in^ fluence in a vain effort to combat Tsarism and Japanese imperialism, gave policy a wrong twist, and produced general disarray. The con-ditions which we now face have their origin, then, in events exactly twenty-five years old. They all come by direct descent from the Korean war of 1894-95; and if we are to find a radical and lasting solution for all the perplexing ills of the day it is from the Korean period that the work must commence. Let it first be understood that the annexation of Korea by Japan in 1910 was an intolerable and unnecessary mistake. The acknowledged protectorate which had existed in that penin-sula as a result of the Manchurian war of 1904-05 was all that was necessary to safeguard Japan's strategic interest: anything more than a protectorate inevitably constituted an inter-national danger. For if England requires in Egypt no more than paramountcy to guarantee a vital waterway in her water-empire, certainly Japan has satisfied strategy when she has se-

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cured that no hostile forces can seize this hilly promontory which reaches out to within one hundred miles of her coasts. Had that unim-aginative statesman Lord Lansdowne really known anything of the history of Asia, he would never have indited his famous dispatch to the Russian Government in 1905, in which he de-clared that Korea was a region which fell naturally under the sway of Japan — when there was voluminous history since the days of the T'ang dynasty (a.d. 600-900) to prove that Korea fell naturally under the sway of China, and that whenever another Power seized con-trol, it was only to use it as a highway to attack Cathay. . . .

The annexation, we say, was an intolerable and unnecessary mistake because of its immedi-ate non-Korean consequences. It made Japan formally and perpetually a Continental Power — that is, gave her an actual stake on the main-land of Asia, a state of affairs which had never previously existed. It committed her to main-taining a large garrison to overawe the Korean population, which was violently hostile. It incited her to extend this land-empire under thinly-concealed forms into Southern Man-churia, by giving the railway system which she had captured from Bussia a special character,

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which later she further accentuated by uniting it with the Korean railway system, thus making a Chinese railway and a Japanese railway one and the same entity. It encouraged her to adopt, on the outbreak of the Chinese Revolu-tion and the disappearance of the Manchu dynasty, the doctrine Germany had adopted re-garding the Anglo-German understanding of 1900 — ^because Germany had then a secret agreement with Russia — that Manchuria must be held as outside the scope of any agreement regarding China, China meaning China Proper, although this Western geographical distinction is unknown among the Chinese themselves, who for many hundreds of years have treated all Chinese-settled territory precisely on the same footing. Finally, with the outbreak of the European war, it awakened in her the ambi-tion to acquire openly dominant rights north-wards to the Amur River, and westwards to the Gobi Desert — the whole original empire of Manchus, which was a Manchu-Mongolian realm governed from Moukden and including by al-liance all the banners or '* hordes" of Tartary — a thing her military oflScers declared easy of accomplishment, ^he complications and irrita-tions which have attended Japanese participa-tion in the Allied intervention in the Russian

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SETTLEMENT OF THE QUESTION

Far East are the natural children of this strange mesalliance between an island-empire and the Asiatic mainland ; and the almost savage manner in which Japan has tried to seize sole control of the Ussuri railway and the Chinese Eastern railway — deliberately wrecking for many months all American attempts under the Stevens Commission to better Russian com-munications, and starving millions of people in Siberia in consequence, form a sermon on po-litical morality as eloquent as the Sermon on the Mount.

These things have a close and intimate con-nection with the Chinese question : they are in the nature of the necessary introduction to the settlement. For unless they are closely and intimately associated in the mind as a very large part of the reason why China makes no progress, it is impossible to convey to those who live far distant from these scenes an ade-quate appreciation of the reality of China's difficulties. The presence of Japan in Korea as lord of the soil ; her holding of two fortified areas on the Chinese coast, with their connect-ing railway systems; her advance into Trans-baikalia and inner Mongolia with important military forces, all these things are every whit as paralysing to Peking as the occupation of

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Belgium and the Northern French railways by the Germans was paralysing to Paris; and it is the refusal to recognize that there is absolute analogy in such matters which makes discus-sion of China *s improvement so illusory.

The first and most essential step in the building-up of the new Chinese State, if that is really desired, is to have it accepted cate-gorically by all the Powers alike that all rail-ways on Chinese soil are a vital portion of Chinese sovereignty and must be directly controlled by the Chinese Government: that station-masters, personnel, and police-troops must be Chinese citizens, technical foreign help being limited to a set standard; and that all railway concessions within the territory of the Republic without exception, from the Amur River in the extreme North to the Red River in the extreme South, must henceforth be con-sidered as Chinese national property to be handed over as soon as circumstances permit to the National Railway Board.

The test-case which will come immediately before the Peace Conferences is the German Shantung railway,^ a system of under five hun-

1 The reader is invited to study carefully the two Shantung Bailway Agreements in the Appendix, forced through just prior to the Armistice and never ratified.

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dred kilometres, very valuable extensions of which Japan has claimed as an inheritance from the original German concessionaires. This state of affairs, if left untouched by an Inter-national Act such as has been proposed, will gradually create a railway enclave on the Man-churian model in the heart of old China. For along the course of such railways, new railway towns inevitably spring up, bringing all the complications which conflicting jurisdiction creates. To solve this conflict the stronger Power first employs force; then, to give its authority a deeper meaning, it sets up its own courts ; administers so-called justice ; and sends its police-officers far from the zone of the rail-way to satisfy its judgments. This is already what has happened in Shantung; infallibly it will happen wherever Japanese railways go.*

Here, then, is international business of the first importance which cannot be brushed aside. It is absolutely essential that when this test-case comes up stout defenders be found who will realize that a drama as real to the Chinese people as Kaiserism has been to the European peoples is in process of being enacted ; and that beneath the surface every principle for which

* Regarding this railway question, see the remarkable facts discloMd in the secret agreement, Document I, in the Appendix.

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the war has been fought is at stake — to be hon-oured or disavowed.

For in the economics of modern communi-ties, conmiunications have acquired such vast significance that it may be truly said that they constitute to-day the most tangible evidence of sovereignty; and that if they are left in the hands of aliens, surrounded by their own troops, what you have is a de facto military oc-cupation, which can be followed only by more war or by open annexation. No one with any acquaintance with recent history can deny this elementary proposition ; and all arguments that the Chinese administration is unfitted to as-sume control are placed out of court, seeing that the number of foreign railway experts employed in the National Railway Board is con-stantly growing and that British-constructed railways in China have for a generation been peacefully administered on a system which has never brought the conflict which is inevitable whenever Japanese interests are involved. No matter what attitude is oflScially adopted by the Great Powers at the Peace Conference — no matter how much they may wish to avoid any discussion at all, the Chinese railway issue will be irrevocably forced on the world's attention in the near future, as there are ten thousand

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miles of delayed railways to be built, and ten thousand troubles will spring from them unless obscurity and obscurantism are forthwith ban-ished.

For lagging not far behind the urgency of this railway matter, is the whole question of Chinese trade taxation — a question which has never been more than hastily touched upon and as hastily dropped by foreign negotiators be-cause it has hitherto been beyond their ability and vision to deal with it. Viscount Grey, in a recent speech which referred to the League of Nations and the good one nation can do another, instanced the Chinese Maritime Cus-toms as an example of successful alien admin-istration, showing by his citation that he was ignorant of the facts. The late Sir Kobert Hart, the originator and organizer of this sys-tem, which in the popular imagination is sup-posed to insure the merchant and the manu-facturer a successful entry into China, was something of a philosopher and a good deal of a diplomatist ; and consequently he was discreet enough not to reveal to the world that he was not doing what he was supposed to be doing. The administration which he erected was sim-ply an accountancy, which was able to justify itself because it was dealing with a foreign

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thing — the steamer — and which was acclaimed as model and perfect when loans were secured on its receipts, because it made bondholders believe that their interest-coupons were in charge of an institution as solid and as perma-nent as the Bank of England.

Yet as a matter of fact the Maritime Cus-toms has never touched Chinese life or eco-nomics in the slightest, nor has it greatly facili-tated trade, which should be its chief function. True, it has enabled merchants to load and un-load their cargoes on a water-front against a fixed tariff; but ten minutes beyond that water-front barriers as high as mountains may and do exist,— with the markets irrevocably hidden behind them. To those who know that China *s foreign trade still only amounts to four silver dollars per annum per head of population (the lowest percentage in the world for the greatest nation of small dealers that has ever existed) the Chinese Maritime Customs is a mere make-shift ; a monument to the fierce fight which the maritime nations carried on in the early part of the nineteenth century regarding their in-herent right to ports of entry along river and coast ; a record of the fact that the Dying God — the Emperor — could not find officers to col-lect his duties during the great Taiping Eebel-

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lion: a proof that the foreign consulates were honest enough to do it for him.

For at the same time that the Maritime Cus-toms came into being as a quasi-foreign crea-tion, the Taiping Rebellion and the loss of great revenues created likin, a system of petty-levies carried out by means of barriers placed wherever trade passes, which because it accen-tuates provincialism undoes all the good the Maritime Customs should do with its fixed tariff. Until some Power does for all China what Prussia, in spite of her sins, once did for all Germany — that is, creates a Chinese ZoU-verein, or Customs Union, making absolute Free Trade within the territories of the Repub-lic a fact — commerce in China will continue to be a medieval enterprise, inviting medieval diplomacy suitable to the courts of petty princes and amounting in the gross to little more than the trade of Switzerland.

Sixeen years ago — to be exact, in 1902 — Eng-land attempted to be that Power and in the Mackay Treaty, signed by Lord Inchcape in Shanghai, she agreed to a large tariff increase, abolishing likin in the famous Article VIII, on the strict understanding that the treaty was to be inoperative until all the Treaty Powers had signed identical instruments. In 1903, largely

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because Kussia in Manchuria was then such an international peril, America and Japan fol-lowed suit — making the same reservations whilst they introduced the same clauses, thus securing that one more pious hope was en-shrined in the dust of Chinese archives, to be left there indefinitely like an Egyptian mummy. Since then nothing has been done — ^nothing for sixteen years; and in the routine decennial tariff revision which has just taken place in Shanghai, Japan, until the Armistice in Europe of the 11th November, placed every obstacle in the way of China, even acquiring an effective five per cent, levy which has been her treaty right for sixty years.

As in railways so in Customs matters, it is once again Japan that renders so difficult the task of real reform, not only in the matter of treaties but in the matter of the daily routine. At all ports where Japanese commissioners of Maritime Customs hold office, it is undeniable that centres of the contraband trade have been established, opium and its derivatives being so openly smuggled that the annual net import of Japanese morphia into China (although this trade is forbidden by International Conven-tion) is now said to be twenty tons a year — an amount sufficient to poison a whole nation.

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In the case of Tsingtao it has been proved be-yond a doubt that, since the Japanese military occupation, opium has been introduced as mili-tary stores on such an immense scale as to give the authorities a royalty of several million pounds sterling with which immense tracts of land round Kiaochow Bay have been pur-chased, so that no matter what the Peace Treaty may say regarding evacuation and handing back to China the German lease, Japan will absolutely control this outlet to a crowded hinterland, and thus do much to secure her commercial supremacy for all time.

Now if the free nations of the world desire that a vastly increased Chinese trade shall as-sist in wiping-out the ill-effects of the European cataclysm which has destroyed the accumulated wealth of half a century, the establishment of a Chinese ZoUverein — that is, complete Free Trade within the limits of Chinese territory, with a complete abolition of all provincial and coastwise duties and a complete checking of present abuses — must be secured. At a time when Japanese trade, in spite of a heavy Pro-tectionist tariff, has risen to nearly two thou-sand million gold dollars a year, or more than thirty gold dollars per head of population, it is monstrous that Chinese trade should amount

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to little more than three dollars gold per head of population. That the Japanese people on a per capita basis should have a commerce a thousand per cent, larger than the commerce of the Chinese people — bom traders, be it re-membered — ^proves conclusively that the whole Chinese fiscal system is radically wrong; and as the commercial nations hold China in thral-dom with their commercial treaties, it is they who must make the first move to liberate the purchasing-power of the Chinese people. Statisticians are agreed that a legitimate basis of calculation is to assume that China could immediately do a trade per head of population amounting to half the amount of the Japanese trade per person, if all obstructions were cleared away. On this assumption, a China liberated from provincialism and militarism should have an annual turn-over of six billion gold dollars, (1,200 millions sterling,) an amount which would place her in the front rank of trading nations, and (assuming that imports and exports roughly balanced and that the twelve and one-half per cent. Mackay Im-port Tariff was the average levy) would give her an annual revenue of 375 million gold dol-lars from import duties alone. This sum would provide interest and sinking-fund on four times

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the present amount of the national indebted-ness, adding in every loan made for no matter what purpose during the past thirty years, and including all the reckless borrowing of the past quinquennium.

If and when this matter of Chinese trade comes up for consideration, another matter which is closely allied to it should not be for-gotten.

This is the question of exterritoriality.

To most people who have lived under their own laws and accepted such a condition as natural all the world over, the idea of exterri-toriality — that is, that in a given territory you are not liable to the jurisdiction of the local authority, but come under jurisdiction exer-cised by officers of your own country — ^must be surprising.

The origin of exterritoriality is to be sought on the shores of the Mediterranean, where in the period of transition from the age of Rome's universal empire to that of independent terri-torial sovereignties, it was held necessary by the maritime cities and republics to appoint officers to take charge of the depositaries of merchandise and exercise jurisdiction over their citizens. This practice, which was well-established by the eleventh century, received

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a great impetus when the Near East fell under the domination of the Mahommedans. The Christian nations, who then entered into rela-tions with the Turkish authority, were careful in their treaties to provide for the establish-ment of consulates ; and the administration of the law of the nation represented was admitted to form an essential part of the consular func-tions.

It was on this Turkish precedent, then, that practice in the Far East was based. In the first commercial treaty ever entered into be-tween China and a Western Power — the British Treaty of Nanking of 1842 — the word exterri-toriality, however, does not occur and no pro-vision was made for the exercise of jurisdic-tion by consular officers. In a supplementary treaty for the regulation of trade signed the following year exterritoriality, however, begins to take shape. It was agreed, for instance, that British merchants and others residing at, or resorting to, the Five Ports opened to trade ** shall not go into the surrounding country beyond certain short distances to be named by the local authorities in concert with the British consul and on no pretence for purpose of traffic' '; whilst as for seamen and persons be-longing to the ships they shall only be allowed

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to land under special rules. Another clause in the same treaty provides that at each of the five ports opened to trade * * one English cruiser will be stationed to enforce good order and discipline amongst the crews of merchant-ship-ping and to support the necessary authority of the consul over British subjects '\

Here exterritorial jurisdiction emerges, not as it has developed, but as then seemed neces-sary. It was a police-authority over unruly persons of alien race who had forced their way into Chinese anchorages and were so deter-mined to trade that the right to do so had been granted them by the Emperor. All the rough-and-tumble history of the Canton delta during the generation preceding these formal treaties looms up from these clauses; drunken English seamen rowing off from their sailing-ships and indulging in riotous conduct; opium-dealers slipping away in fast boats to hidden creeks where their traflBc could be carried on con-cealed; the Chinese authority, unable to cope with these heavy-fisted men, and only occasion-ally, when murder or manslaughter was in-volved, getting hold of the culprit, who was strangled in accordance with the lex loci.

Nearly twenty years pass with practice in this inchoate state, the more precise American

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Treaty of 1844 being generally used as a guide to consular authority. But in the Treaty of Tientsin of 1858 — which was not ratified until Peking had been captured in 1860 and the Son of Heaven had sought safety in flight — ^Article XVI lays down specifically and absolutely that British subjects guilty of crimes * * shall be tried and punished according to the Laws of Great Britain"; and similar clauses being almost im-mediately inserted in all the treaties with the Powers, exterritoriality was fully enthroned.

That was exactly sixty years ago, and in sixty years there has been no change save to scatter exterritorialized persons by the thou-sand over the length and breadth of the land, often without any consular authority within a week's journey. For the right of residence in the interior, which all missionaries possess by virtue of the French Treaty of Tientsin, and the most-favoured nation clause which is found in all similar instruments, having long ago been annexed not only by countless Japanese but by many other foreigners as well, an entirely new situation exists which urgently calls for reform. Since the Kevolution of 1911 and the proclamation of the Kepublic, China has indeed tacitly accepted this condition of affairs only because she believes that when her case is

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properly presented no reasonable person will deny that she is entitled to justice.

That is why Young China demands the sum-mary abolition of exterritoriality, and cries aloud that inasmuch as in the inoperative Shanghai treaties of sixteen years ago it was specifically stated that so soon as a reform of the judicial system was accomplished this foreign jurisdiction would be relinquished, the hour has come for the pledge to be redeemed. For a new code has been adopted under the Republic and a new system of courts; and although there is more theory than practice, the independence of the judiciary forms an integral part of the draft Constitution.

Now, as no questions are so thorny as ques-tions of law and jurisdiction, it is obvious that if this one matter is to be handled Successfully it will require a special conference of all the Treaty Powers. The vast and complicated interests which have grown up in China since the Boxer period necessitate a special practice being grafted on to' the Chinese administration step by step, rather than any dramatic relin-quishment of old rights. It is not possible to refuse to deal with this matter, any more than it is not possible to refuse to deal with the railway question. For since her declaration of

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war against Germany and Austria, China has had charge of all persons of German and Aus-trian nationality, in spite of the efforts of the Dutch diplomatic and consular representatives (temporarily in charge of German and Austrian interests) to assume jurisdiction. A number * of important Germans and Austrians are at the moment of writing held interned by China in special camps; and that China in the treaties of peace with the enemy Powers will insist on retaining at least police jurisdiction over citi-zens of these nations is quite certain. The Chinese police-system has made such advances during the past decennium that there can be little doubt that so long as appellate courts, with foreign assessors, are provided for, it should be possible to erect a system which will be a half-way house to the total abolition of exterritoriality.

The precise methods are already matters of dispute and can certainly not be settled in any casual manner. Some have proposed that there shall be a probationary ten-year period during which China shall be given a trial. Others have declared that the only method is an extension of the mixed court system, although this system in Shanghai is a lamentable failure. Yet an-other class declare that no modification is pos-

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sible until conditions throughout the land*l2ave been entirely revolutionized. But it is obyfcus that the complete throwing-open of China, wife, the universal right of trade and residence f reeljf"** conceded, cannot be satisfactorily arranged if •; a favoured class is removed from police control — particularly such men as Japanese peddlers, who in hundreds and thousands roam the land retailing great and increasing quantities of morphia and opium in defiance of the law of the land.

Tariff and judicial autonomy go hand in hand; they are the necessary prerogatives of the sovereign State. Until this dual problem is settled in accordance with ordinary world-practice China will be an international cripple.

In this discussion we have travelled the whole road which it is possible to travel in one stage. To proceed further, would entangle issues in the minds of even those who are anxious to understand. Chinese currency; the Chinese debt ; the Chinese civil and military administra-tion ; and the question of parUamentary govern-ment, are best considered separately as the Problem of Peking. They belong to a different category from the semi-foreign issues which we have just discussed, because they are of a different ancestry.

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P]d^:the moment what should be seized upon a^tlie kernel of the imbroglio is that it is neees-j4^fy to hark back to 1895 and the Korean war, ^ ''and deal with the four big questions of leased /•territories and spheres of influence; railways; tariff reform; and judicial reform, from the point of view that Russian imperialism having been perpetually eliminated from Eastern Asia, the maritime nations can push off from the land and settle the issue on the basis of sea-power; since it has been Russian action — and not Ger-man, as in Europe — which has been the terror and the threat, and to which must be primarily traced present Japanese continentalism.

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IV

CHAPTER 4. 北京的难题

THE PROBLEM OF PEKING

The writer has established, it is to be hoped clearly, the outline of his argument regarding the solution of the imbroglio in the Far East. Taking as his starting-point the practical results flowing from the Chinese collapse in the Korean war of 1894, and the present state of China's international commitments, he found that an indispensable element was wholesale treaty reform — not only as a matter of right but as a matter of expediency. He showed how it must be worked out, what were the real diflS-culties, and who really stood to lose by such radical adjustments. And yet it must be con-fessed that even if the relations between China and the West are so fundamentally recast as to revolutionize the old conditions, there will still remain the far more thorny matter of erect-ing in Peking a really competent government, able and willing to govern by constitutional means, and reasonably stable. The problem of Peking is so peculiar that no

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parallel case exists in any other part of the world. Turkey is sometimes quoted as a sim-ilar instance — ^but the differences between China and Turkey are greater than the points of resemblance. Turkey comprises a mixture of races ; the Chinese are absolutely homogeneous. The rule of the Ottoman Turks was based on military conquest ; the Manchus, who were their prototypes, were summarily ousted seven years ago and for many a day prior to their actual collapse had not much more power than the errant descendants of Genghiz Khan. Then Turkey is so close to Europe that her problem in an European issue : China is so far distant that she is remote even to India. Turkey pre-tended to reform, and then surrendered to the Young Turks, who were virtually Young Ger-mans. The Tu-chiin, or military governors in China and their henchmen, may perhaps be held the equivalent of this truculent breed; yet even these semi-ignorant leaders pay homage to the literary traditions of the race, worship formal-ity, and declare that they represent a transi-tional stage which will soon give way to a new brotherhood.

For the time being, however, what we have to-day, particularly in Peking, pending the set-tlement^ is rule by velleities — i.e. by volition

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in its lowest form, which only takes on a positive character when a direct assault is made on the lares and penates of the oflBce-holders. In the past it has been clearly shown how every time the defenders of the Republic have attempted to adopt definite formute in place of this ob-scurantism, they have been beaten into retire-ment in the provinces because they have lacked the necessary force to win. With this inchoate condition in the capital and with the chief cities held by military rule, watchful drifting has be-come the slogan. And although all Chinese know perfectly well that without organization, and without the supremacy of the civil author-ity, it is vain to hope for national solidarity or greatness, no single man has yet been able to effect any lasting improvement. Thus although the empire has gone never to return, and al-though a definite and recognizable advance in ideas is generally admitted to have occurred throughout China, obscure causes which must be referred back to climate and soil, and to the city-type, which a hundred city-bred genera-tions have evolved, tends to perpetuate this political palsy and to make many foreign critics declare there is actual chaos and retrogression. That behind all this — deep-buried in the twi-light of a myriad homes — the supreme

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explanation is to be sought in the very mild impulses of the race, which are expressed in the quietist doctrines animating Chinese so-ciety, is the writer's profound conviction. And so does it happen that the Chinese people have come to think that they have been caught in the Caudine Forks, and that it is the Japanese who are striving mightily to play the part of the Samnites and make them pass under the yoke.

II

What are the vital diflSculties at the present moment in the way of civil authority being so constituted as to be effective!

First, and greatest of all, there is the ques-tion of Parliament and the role it should play in the life of the State. Round this question a fierce struggle has raged from the very in-ception of the Republic, because the abdication of the Manchus was only secured by a compro-mise so framed that Conservatives and Radicals could interpret that dramatic act much as they pleased. According to Article 53 of the Nan-king provisional Constitution, promulgated in January, 1912, and accepted as the law of the land, within ten months of that date a National Assembly was to be convened, to frame the permanent Constitution and to be the articulate

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voice of the nation. The first full Parliament should therefore have assembled in Peking by October, 1912 ; it did not meet until April, 1913, owing to deliberate obstruction in the elections practised by Yuan Shih-kai — the last act of which was the assassination of the Southern leader Sung Chiao-jen. This Parliament was not yet fully organized when Yuan Shih-kai, alleging that the National Council (sitting prior to the convocation of Parliament) had given him power to do so, forced through the great Reorganization Loan over Parliament's head, denying that it had the right to scrutinize this important measure and being supported in his unconstitutional and reactionary policy by five Powers — England, France, Germany, Russia, and Japan. Native arms and foreign diplomacy thus formed as unholy alliance in China in 1913 as in Vienna Congress days in Europe in 1815. This first great assault on the Republic was followed by a six-month period of intimidation and bribery, after which Yuan Shih-kai finally secured the passage of the Presidential Election Law and was elected full president for the first five-year term. Thereupon, having a complete legal title, he carried out his coup d'etat of the 4th November, 1913, and unseated all Southern members of Parliament, following this by de-

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stroying by means of bogus enactments the legal framework on which international recog-nition of the Republic had been accorded ; finally capping it all two years later by an elaborate ballot-fraud whereby he declared himself elected Emperor of the Chinese d la Napoleon and head of a so-called Constitutional Mon-archy. That comprises the complete story of the first four years of the rule of Peking over the provinces under the Republic and shows what a hollow mockery it was.

With Yuan Shih-kai^s death in June, 1916, the 1913 Parliament returned to the capital — weakened but still determined to consummate its main work, which was the formal passage of a permanent Constitution, the draft of which had been so long complete. In spite of every kind of opposition, such progress was made that in less than a year, with the exception of the seven clauses which follow, the two Houses had passed the completed instrument through its second reading, and would have entirely terminated the work had there not been deliber-ate military obstruction. The seven disputed clauses were: —

Article 32. The ordinary sessions of the national Assembly shall begin on the 1st August of each year.

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Article 35. Both Houses shall meet in joint session at the opening and closing of the National Assembly. If one House suspends its session, the other House shall do likewise during the same period. When the House of Representatives is dissolved, the Senate shall adjourn during the same period.

Article 75. With the concurrence of two-thirds or more of the members of the Senate present, the Presi-dent may dissolve the House of Representatives, but there must not be a second dissolution during the period of the same session.

When the House of Representatives is dissolved by the President another election shall take place im-mediately and the convocation of the House at a fixed date within five months should be effected to continue the session.

Article 82. When a vote of want of confidence in the Cabinet Ministers is passed, if the President does not dissolve the House of Representatives according to the provisions made in Article 75, he should re-move the Cabinet Ministers.

Article 92. Should the President disapprove of any bill of law passed by the National Assembly he shall, within the period allowed for promulgation, state the reason of his disapproval and request the reconsidera-tion of the same by the National Assembly. If a bill has not been submitted with a request for reconsid-eration and the period of promulgation has passed, it shall become law. But the above shall not apply to the case when the session of the National Assembly

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is adjourned or the House of Representatives dis-solved before the period for the promulgation is ended.

Article 107. The method of organization of the Auditing Department and the qualifications of audi-tors shall be fixed by law. During his term of office the auditor shall not be dismissed or transferred to any other duty or his salary reduced except in accord-ance with the law. The manner of punishment of auditors shall be fixed by law.

Article 108. The Chief of the Auditing Department shall be elected by the Senate. The Chief of the Auditing Department may attend sittings of both Houses and report on the audit with explanatory statements.

Now even to those who are not over-familiar with constitutional enactments the aim and pur-pose of these Articles should be tolerably clear : they were drafted to secure the real indepen-dence and supremacy of the National Assembly and to serve as checks against abuses which experience had shown were the chief dangers.

Article 32 had a certain technical importance owing to the 19i8 Presidential election, which has now taken place. Articles 35 and 75, plac-ing the Senate in a very strong constitutional position vis-a-vis the Chief Executive, and re-stricting his power over the Lower House, were

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looked upon by the militarist party as their death-warrant ; whilst Article 82, which strictly defines the President's action when a vote of want of confidence in the Cabinet Ministers is passed, contains the very essence of the whole constitutional fight. Article 92 dealing with the President's suspensive veto has been looked upon as hardly less important: and the two concluding Articles, in which Audit is so strictly defined and the control over the National Purse retained by this method after supplies have been actually voted — ^has been one of the bit-terest subjects of dispute. Finally, just before the rupture, a proposal to tack on to the Con-stitution an additional chapter on local govern-ment, dealing with the governing of the provinces, had taken such concrete form that a complete draft had been made ; and as in this draft the powers given to Provincial Assemblies were very large, the sweeping-away of the Tu-chiin system was imminent.

In June, 1917, although the question of an immediate declaration of war against Germany and Austria was the technical reason, this par-liamentary question brought the expected crisis. For the second time in the brief life of the Republic the party with whom power really rested — the military element^ — saw its existence

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openly menaced. Accordingly, after a long and bitter struggle behind the scenes, President Li Yuan-hung was finally intimidated into promul-gating a Mandate of Dissolution, although he had no constitutional right to do so; and as the capital was already under the control of the military, Parliament was forced to scatter. No doubt it was the fact that the ipimediate sequel to this dissolution was a burlesque restoration of the Manchus, lasting eleven days, which confused the Northern military party. Had they been well-advised, they would have hastened the summoning of a new Parliament on the valid election law of 1913 and sought a compromise on the seven Articles. But finding the field absolutely free — after they had thrown down the Manchus again — and being fearful of the future, they summoned a packed and illegal National Council, under the so-called authority of the provisional Constitution ; instructed this body to alter the election law, and then held a general election which sent to Peking two greatly-reduced, packed Houses in time to carry out the quinquennial Presidential election. Their official candidate, curiously enough, was probably the best man in China, Hsii Shih-chang, a former viceroy, who by training and natural inclination is sufficiently broad-minded

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to settle the problem — if supported. Elected six months ago his tenure of office has already brought improvement; and now that an actual peace conference has assembled in Shanghai to settle the dispute between North and South, hopes are reviving that the conunon sense of the Chinese race will win a lasting victory.

For fifteen months, however, desultory civil war between North and South has destroyed the fertile regions of Hunan, Szechuan, and Shensi provinces; and until the Allies, after much pressure, sent in Joint Notes on the necessity of instant internal peace, there were no signs that the two great divisions in the country could do more than continue their watchful drifting and thereby intensify the turmoil.

m

Now it must be plain from this account that something has been radically wrong with foreign diplomacy as well as with Chinese hearts for such a record to stand to the dis-credit of Peking. The type of diplomatic agent the several Allied governments have main-tained in the Chinese capital during the Re-publican period has not been the type which the conditions emphatically call for. With the

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exception of the United States, which are repre-sented by a professor of political and economic science, all the Allied representatives since the inception of the Republic have been men lamen-tably untrained in the part played in the gov-erning of their own countries by their own Legislatures. Had this not been so, no such stupidity would have been shown as in 1913, when with a golden opportunity to enforce con-stitutionalism on the leader of the militarists — Yuan Shih-kai — ^by demanding Parliamentary ratification of a prime financial measure, and thus securing once and for all that financial centralization in China was based on legislative acts, foreign ministers deliberately assisted the Dictator to make a coup d'etat by means of foreign money — and thus gave the quarrel a vicious international character. The day has surely passed when such things can be toler-ated; but until England, France, Italy, Russia, and Japan publicly repent, and send as envoys to the Chinese capital men specially selected by virtue of a long parliamentary experience in their own countries — plenipotentiaries who thoroughly understand the necessity of the su-premacy of the Legislature even in China — there will be no great improvement in the methods of government in Peking. For China

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to-day leans absolutely and entirely on the West — no matter what else may be pretended; and instead of rebuffing the widespread desire to benefit by the superior political knowledge of Europe and America, that desire should be stimulated in every possible way and the fact made perfectly clear by the acts of the accred-ited foreign representatives that a strong government, based on constitutionalism, is their one and only concern.

This viewpoint is fortified when we consider the actual nature of the contact between the foreign legations and the metropolitan govern-ment. That contact is not diplomatic in the ordinary sense of the word : rather is it finan-cial and economic, having come by direct descent from the time when the first foreign representatives in the Canton factory days were Superintendents of Trade. The foreign minis-ters are therefore principally concerned with questions arising out of loan contracts; with questions concerning the periodic release of surpluses of the Customs and Salt collections which have been almost entirely hypothecated abroad; with disputes arising from the inter-pretation of treaties and covenants governing commerce and residence and land-ownership— in a word, with all the disjecta membra of a

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mercantile imperialism. And because of this peculiar heredity — with ninety years of strife and gunboat methods behind it — Peking diplo-macy, encased since 1900 in a fortified diplo-matic quarter, has developed a peculiar mentaUty among those who interpret it, making them small, irritable, and meticulous when imagination and common-sense and personal acquaintance with the liberating world-move-ment of the day are emphatically required.* No better illustration of this could be given than to recall that when a decade ago China ordered the reform of the archaic system under which the Maritime Customs was controlled from the Chinese Foreign Office, Great Britain instead of agreeing on the necessity, and simply

iNo better illustration of the extraordinary nature of Peking diplomacy could be given than to cite the case of the Russian Legation.

This Legation, with its consulates, being deprived of all funds by the Bolshevist capture of the Petrograd administra-tion, entered into negotiations with the Peking Government to continue the payment to it of three-fourths of the Boxer indemnity— that is. $1,800,000 a year-^fter the other Allies had agreed to suspend provisionally for five years their quotas as a result of the ^Chinese declaration of war against Germany and Austria.

China consented.

The result to-day is that a Minister Plenipotentiary, who represents no ^vernment, and who is paid by the government to which he is accredited, can stop diplomatic sanction to financial measures to which China requires the unanimous consent of the Treaty Powers by saying he has no instruc-tions! There has never been a more Gilbertian situation in the history of diplomacy since the days of the Bourbons.

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stipulating that the controlling agency should be as in other countries the Treasury or Min-istry of Finance, raised a terrible outcry against anything being done at all and then let the matter drop — with the result that to-day the Maritime Customs control, which might have been rightly placed, is under separate little government oflSces hidden away in an obscure lane.^

These matters — and what they directly sig-nify — are of the highest importance. For the two ministries on which China 's future largely depends, because they are the interpreters of the civilization and organization which the breakdown of the Confucian state-system has brought into the country, are simply the Min-istry of Finance and the Ministry of Com-munications. Virtually all the politico-financial business arising out of foreign intercourse is in their hands; and only indirectly in the hands of the Chinese Foreign OflSce. Long ago it should have been the aim of all the liberal Powers to place under the roofs of these two

lA very valuable government return for the year ending on the 30th June, 1919, will be found Appendix M, giving precise figures regarding the Public Debt and the National Ex-penditure. The most cursory study will convince readers that the Chinese fiscal problem is easy of solution on account of the lightness of the debt and the cheapness of the administra-tion in comparison with what exists elsewhere.

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Boards — fully centralized and fully defined — all matters which are justly the objects of their official concern. Publication of facts and figures should have been substituted for hag-gling about details — not hjT)othecation or alien control, but organization should have been the goal. The Ministry of Finance, with its many foreign Bond Issues, should not only have direct and absolute control over the four great sources of revenue. Customs, Salt, Land-tax, and Wine and Tobacco, but should have been stimulated into issuing proper quarterly statements in Chinese and English, thus bringing light into dark places. There should not have been a constant policy of frightening the Chinese with visions of a Foreign Debt Bureau under foreign control on the Egyptian-Turkish model. A real Chinese service of the national debt, in place of the present semi-foreign pawnbroking meth-ods; a proper currency system, with token coins and bank-notes maintained at parity — these things would be far more beneficial to the world at large than spheres of influence, or personal victories signalized by the appoint-ment of favoured nationals to sinecures. At present all these questions are inextricably and hopelessly confused; but inasmuch as the pro-visional suspension of the Boxer indemnities

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(since China's declaration of war against Ger-many and Austria) will afford an opportunity in the near future for a wholesale review of the financial problem, this view of reform — ^namely, one policy under one roof — must be vindicated. For depending directly on revenue-control and currency is the whole question of the credit of the Chinese people, which is to-day in as sorry a position as all the rest. China has vir-tually accepted as her money standard the silver dollar of the same weight and fineness as the Mexican dollar and the people are becoming accustomed to it. About 200 million of these units have been actually coined by the Chinese mints, not to speak of the hundreds of millions imported in the past from Mexico, and melted in part into sycee. But this currency is oflScially still only a shopping currency; the money of account is still the tael, which pass from one emporium to another and finally into the credi-tor-banks in standardized lumps of bullion which vary according to locality. And as the silver dollars are often melted down as fast as they are coined, and as the importation of the white metal has been restricted for several years, we have the crowning anomaly to-day of the chief state bank — the Bank of China — ^un-able to-day to meet its note issue in the capital

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and with its notes at 50 per cent, discount; whilst its branches at the commercial ports manage to maintain their issues at parity be-cause their balances are daily replenished by trade operations, and are not periodically raided by the army-leaders.

From the international point of view this matter of the currency, and the whole loan policy of the Powers, is indeed in as pretty a diplomatic tangle as a Talleyrand could desire. Eight years ago, on American initiative, a cur-rency loan of 50 million gold dollars was signed; but the Revolution of 1911 prevented either the loan being floated or any true re-organization being attempted. Four Powers participated in this loan, England, America, France, and Germany, this oflScial group being later expanded by the admission of Russia and Japan, who had protested that they were being discriminated against by being excluded. Meanwhile in 1913 America dropped out of participation in Chinese finance because of President Wilson's w^ell-known declaration that the conditions of the foreign loans seemed to touch very nearly the administrative independ-ence of China; transactions of this character being obnoxious to the principles upon which the American Government rested. This reduced

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the number of participating countries to five. Since the world-war Germany has, of course, had her partnership in the official consortium cancelled; and the bankruptcy of Russia like-wise precludes her from being a sponsor of any Chinese loan.

But this last remark brings up an essential point. These semi-official loans to China, al-though nominally made by a four-Power group, (which became a six-Power group and finally a five-Power group,) are simply in the hands of certain favoured banks supported by their Legations. In the case of Russia, the Russo-Asiatic Bank is the sole participant; and as this institution is largely owned by French interests, so far from Russia dropping out of Chinese loans, in spite of the fact that it may be a quarter-of-a-century before financial sta-bility has returned to the Bolshevik-ridden country, the French interests concerned are determined that Russia, in the person of a single bank, shall remain a nominal participant, as rich profits accrue from the handling of Chinese issues.

The following should make this clear. The loans, being gold-loans, are paid over to China in silver-credits at exchange-rates which are 'worked* by the banks in an admittedly

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scandalous manner. Thus, in the case of the £25,000,000 sterling Keorganization Loan of 1913, it was discovered by chance that the in-stalments paid over in Peking were placed to China's credit at a profit of 3 per cent, to the participant banks over and above legitimate commission and over and above the true market-rates. Similarly, by various intricate juggling methods, nominally made in the inter-ests of the foreign bondholders, instalments for the service of foreign loans must be paid monthly into the foreign issuing banks, who allow the Chinese Government 2 per cent, an-nual interest, and thus make privately at least 5 per cent, per annum from the use of the Chinese Government's moneys. Furthermore other abuses have grown up. Thus in 1915, nominally to safeguard the interest of the bond-holders and in defiance of the particular loan agreement involved, the foreign banks stopped payment to China of ten million dollars of salt surplus, and for four years have held this amount in their coffers as a * reserve' to pay Chinese coupons, allowing China 2 per cent, per annum on this amount and making at least 5 per cent, net profit per annum on the trans-action. The issuing banks have therefore been placed by their governments in the illegal and

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immoral position of being able to utilize China 's financial resources in their own interests under the plea that they are safeguarding the interests of the bondholders : that this abuse, which has largely arisen because of the presence in Peking of foreign diplomatic representatives who know little or nothing of business or the money-market, must be terminated at an early date cannot be refuted.

Three steps, which will be bitterly opposed by the foreign banks, should be taken if the problem of Peking is to be solved. First, the next loan should be made to China precisely in the manner that the United States has made loans to the Allies during the war — namely, the participating states should directly make the necessary advances, or at least directly con-trol them. Secondly, the advances should come to China in actual silver, to be delivered in monthly instalments spread over a long period of five or ten years, and turned immediately into dollar currency which it shall be made a penal offence to melt down, or *chop', or re-move from circulation. Thirdly, what was once done in 1856 to remedy the conflict between currencies must be repeated. Then, the Spanish Carolus dollar being insufficient for trade re-quirements, and the Mexican dollar not being

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accepted in its stead, on a given day all ac-counts throughout China were transferred into taelsy which were made the basis for all trade and for all public and private payments. What is now required is that on a given day, say in 1920 or 1921, all accounts in China from one end of the country to the other without excep-tion, private as well as governmental, after a proper six-months notice, be transferred at fixed rates into Chinese Republican dollars, no other currency being legal tender or permitted even as a money of account, and punishment for infringement being rigidly carried out.

To enforce such a vast programme will neces-sitate foreign state help in the form of the loan of Treasury officials from the four countries who are alone in an independent financial posi-tion to-day, namely the United States, Great Britain, France, and Japan. China would re-ceive Treasury officials of standing in a very different way from the appointees of commer-cial banks, or of the Legation junta. That such a step will finally become imperative is certain from the fact that it is through the medium of the Bank of China — which should be made the sole Bank of Issue in the country — that a stand-ard currency in notes and in token coins can alone be secured. The Bank of China not only

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requires reform, but a great addition of capital and the opening of five hundred new provincial offices; no such expansion can take place with-out expert help and the loan of a large amount of foreign capital under the direct control of the participating foreign states. The most bitter opponents of such a reform will be the privileged foreign banks which will be forced to relinquish their octopus grip on the Chinese giant — a grip which directly contributes to the present palsy in Peking. That in all these cir-cumstances, with the prospect of the action we have outlined looming near, the pro-Japanese party in Peking (and it should be thoroughly understood that the pro-Japanese party is to-day very powerful) should have attempted just before the close of the European war to push through a so-called gold-note scheme, a project rotten to the core, but designed ultimately to make the Japanese yen the unit throughout China, is very understandable; for in the present confusion anything is feasible. That this same pro-Japanese party should also have attempted to secure the appointment of a Japanese Treasury official. Baron Sakatani, as sole controller of Chinese currency, is further proof that immediate action is necessary on the part of the interested states.

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IV

We have mentioned not only the Ministry of Finance but the Ministry of Communications, In China it may be truly said that evil com-munications corrupt good manners. The extra-ordinary nature of the railway tangle to-day is due both to the false principles on which the development of Chinese railways has been con-ducted in the past, and to the present bank-ruptcy and lack of authority of the Central Government, which is forced to pawTi every liquid asset — particularly its communications — to obtain hard cash; and is likewise compelled to allow the militarv almost a free hand in com-mandeering rolling-stock and riding roughshod over its behests.

We have already sufficiently insisted upon the nationalization of Chinese railways — that is, on the necessity of all railways being unified in a common system, and so-called railways concessions being pooled as soon as they have been built. In the past the method pursued by foreign interests has been as follows. After a bitter struggle in the dark, with every rival Legation working through every possible agency to prevent consummation, a railway con-cession {i.e. a building concession) is granted

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to a single concessionaire or to a group of con-cessionaires, whicli provides for the issue of a gold loan on the security of the given line; the amortization of that loan after a certain period; and the appointment of a chief engi-neer and a chief accountant of the concession-aire's nationality — the whole enterprise being nominally controlled by a Chinese director-general, together with a host of his relatives. The granting of this concession, however, is held to carry certain rights, irrespective of the real interests of the countrj^; for instance, the concessionaire considers it necessary to stop the building of any line in his vicinity, particu-larly parallel lines, and sometimes feeder lines if contracted for by other parties. Moreover, the sphere of influence is still such a cherished doctrine among the diplomatic fraternity, that the invasion of a given sphere by a contractor of rival nationality is one of the most danger-ous crimes, prodding a local casus belli which is fought out bitterly in the coulisses of the various ministries and throughout the Far Eastern press, Asia Minor could hardly pro-vide a more brilliantly tinted map than the present railway map of China when it is coloured according to the nationality of each concessionaire group. There is consequently

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no unity in Chinese railways, neither in admin^ istration or in finance; they are run on the most unbusinesslike and wasteful principles; and whilst nominally the Ministry of Com-munications is in supreme command, in prac-tice a centralized government control, of the type which the war has made a commonplace, is still unthought of and unrealizable.

It is this centralized control which must be brought to China — with every railway on Chinese soil directly controlled from Peking. The fact that existing lines are already large dividend-earners should simplify the solution of the problem — which as in the case of cur-rency should be worked out by government experts dispatched to China by the interested states, w^ho will not be in any way influenced by the old-fashioned mercantile imperialism.

China requires such a reform for internal political reasons as well as for external. For, as in the case of every other modern conveni-ence, provincial control cannot be properly cen-tralized unless the abuses which are rapidly be-coming stereotyped are absolutely checked. At the present moment the military element tend more and more to monopolize the railways ; to act generally with such a high hand that the eaming-power and safety of existing lines is

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being gravely compromised ; and to spread the idea that a bully's rule is the only one the country is fit for. It is by means of their local railway control, just as much as by soldiery, that the military governors maintain them-selves.

Now, inasmuch as it is certain that the pay-ment of the Boxer indemnities will never be resumed (since the Allies could not easily con-sent to such a crime), but will be diverted to some good cause such as education, the urgent matter of a system of national, hard-surface highways should not be lost sight of. Republi-can China has inherited from the Manchus a great system of Imperial highways, useless for modem purposes since they are unmetalled, but covering a great portion of the land and capable of knitting the country very closely together, besides vastly increasing the prestige of Peking. The allocation of at least one-quarter of the Boxer indemnities to national road-building would in a decade work miracles of education among the people and strengthen the voice of authority. With credit and currency restored, and with a network of railways and roads cov-ering the twenty-two provinces, republican China might soon become as important a fac-tor in world-commerce and world-industry as

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the United States, since the supply of men and women is virtually endless, and is now increas-ing at the rate of six or seven million persons a year. Only by liberating the natural money-making genius of the Chinese people by giving them reasonable economic guarantees, can Western civilization justify its invasion of Cathay, and its remorseless destruction of the old gods.

There remains one question, and one only, to discuss, and we have done.

This is the policing of the country.

The Chinese army, as has been clearly shown, has degenerated into a political police. To transfer it back to its proper sphere, and to re-duce its numbers, is the work of education and sympathy as well as of political compromise. For it must be remembered that what the pro-vincial generals have been doing in regard to the provincial capitals, and along the connect-ing railways, has been largely taught them by what they see in the metropolis and along the railway leading from the sea to Peking. For-eign garrisons, placed in the capital and at each strategic point in the metropolitan province, under the Boxer protocol have for nineteen

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years accustomed men to the belief that sol-diers are an essential part of politics — national as well as international — and that it is only the man with the rifle who is the man with a policy. In the opinion of the writer justice as well as expediency requires a relaxation of the safeguards established as a result of the now forgotten siege of the Legations. The few thousand foreign troops in North China no longer mean what they once did; the Chinese army is to-day far too powerful in artillery to be overawed by what was once an impressive force. To protract what is a daily source of irritation is a senseless policy: no statesman can endorse it.

A foreign evacuation protocol is therefore just as essential as an evacuation by Chinese generals of the provincial capitals: the two things should go hand in hand.

Already there is an efficient gendarmerie in Peking, perfectly trustworthy and perfectly able to do its duty if police and politics are separated. The Peking police-schools are gradually transferring more and more men to various parts of the country; and that recruits are excellent and well-trained is shown by the fact that the foreign municipality of Shanghai is requisitioning them and finding them supe-

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rior to Japanese constables. A snflSeient num-ber is all that is required — ^half a million for the whole country would guarantee peace and security and largely banish the present unrest. If we are to ensure a happy morrow for the Chinese, all the things which we have touched upon must be considered as one organic whole — to be handled with the idealism and the prac-tical common-sense which have given the name of Woodrow Wilson such prestige and puis-sance. In a word, the problem of Peking should be made the problem of Europe and America, it should be treated as an intimate and not as an insoluble matter, since it has directly grown out of the superior strength in peace and war of the Western man and urgently demands not his enmity but his sympathy and help.

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CHAPTER 5. 若日本拒绝

IF JAPAN REFUSES!

We have reached the last phase — the question of Japan.

Until Japan defeated China in 1894, the con-dition of her armaments, her finance, and her industry was of a modest and even primitive nature. She had an army of a hundred thou-sand soldiers; a navy comprising a few pro-tected cruisers; a silver currency mixed with the remains of an abortive National Bank sys-tem copied (on the late Prince Ito*s recom-mendation) from America; and a foreign trade of a hundred million dollars a year. By her Treaty of Peace, however, she received forty million pounds in sterling; established a gold exchange standard, which was maintained by keeping in London her main stock of the yellow metal (a practice continued even to-day, which has a profound and little-understood effect on Far Eastern politics) ; and almost immediately recovered from Western nations her passion-ately contested tariff and the judicial autonomy

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(the new treaties becoming operative in 1899).

It is from this date, then, that Japan defi-nitely enters international politics ; the rock on which she built was defeated China. Prior to that she had barely been more than a third-class Power, with little vision of greater days. Troubled by many internal problems, her ef-forts to cope with the reorganization of her finances had signally failed. It is true that the matter of her inconvertible paper money had been solved, and a Central Bank of Issue, modelled on the Belgian National Bank, estab-lished before Chinese wealth had been tapped. But without the stock of gold won by the Korean war it is difficult to believe that her ex-change standard, which is the head and front of her banking and industrial system, could have been created. In this, as in other matters, Ja-pan's prototype — absolutely and entirely — ^was Germany of the post 1870-71 period. Germany was her light and her guide — and almost every step that Prussia took after her defeat of France was sedulously copied.

Although she emerged from her Chinese war financially satisfied, Japan was in many ways greatly embittered. Her original Treaty of Peace, which had included the cession of the Liaotung peninsula, had been torn up by the

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IF JAPAN REFUSES!

action of Russia, Germany, and France, who had interposed a blunt fiat backed by battle-ships; and she had been forced to return to China what she had already annexed. She was bitterly hurt by this — both on account of the international humiliation, and because her real motives had been misunderstood. She had be-lieved that the only method of terminating Manchu intrigue in the Korean peninsula was completely to cut oflf all land-contact between the Courts of Peking and Seoul; the Liaotung was therefore desired not so much as a Japa-nese colony as a buffer-territory between two capitals united by historic ties, and by a thousand-mile Imperial highway along which Korea's tribute missions had journeyed for so many centuries. Obsessed with this point of view, which was totallv unrelated to world-politics, the shock to her pride was very great when she was peremptorily shown that the Yellow Sea was not a lake, but part of a general scheme of things which she must envisage as a whole vAth her eyes specially fixed on the heavy guns of the ships from the West.

The action of England had been different from the action of the three Continental Powers. England had declined to be asso-ciated with the intervention, although during

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the period of the war she had frankly warned Japan off all China treaty ports, declaring that she would not tolerate interference with her trade. Nevertheless England was so friendly that it was largely due to her initiative that tariff and judicial subjection were so rapidly abolished, even America not caring to deal with the matter until Britain had spoken.

By 1895, therefore, Japan had certain very clear-cut ideas on international politics. She had been given practical proofs of hostility and of qualified friendship; and American silence during this critical period had told her that the United States as a world-Power was still more of a theory than a fact. Japan was still so weak that she did not dare to challenge what almost immediately took place in Korea because the buffer-territory idea had been destroyed; and the fearful assassination of the old Korean queen by Soshi and secret agents of the Japa-nese Legation showed how desperate the col-lapse of her plans had made her. Russian in-fluence now not only took the place of Chinese influence in Korea, but by the railway plans the great Northern Power showed that her goal was the ice-free waters of the Yellow Sea, which she desired to dominate. The curious and per-verse after-war diplomacy of Li Hung Chang,

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IP JAPAN REFUSESt

which began with secret conversations at the Tsar's coronation in Moscow in 1896 and finally culminated in acquiescence in the cool Slav seizure of Port Arthur, were daggers in the heart of Japan — ^which she was unable to ward oflf. But in 1900, on the occasion of the Boxer explosion, by winning the esteem of the world by the excellence of her expeditionary force, she prepared the ground for what subsequently happened. The Colossus of the North, after playing for more than half a century like a cat with a mouse with Chinese sovereignty, had become too bold. Casting off the fiction of friendly co-operation, which had been her in-sistent cry ever since Muravieff had first sailed down the Amur in the middle of the nineteenth century, Bussia had invaded all Manchuria and established garrisons even to the mouth of the Yalu, her intrigues in Seoul to obtain the lease of a harbour at the toe of the Korean boot — Masampo for choice — being so insistent as to make the Mikado's country seethe with rage.

In 1904 Japan hazarded the impossible. The splendid gesture which involved her in war with Bussia was forced on her; it was in every sense a war which had to be fought if Japan were to retain her real independence. There is no question but that Bussia directly and cate-

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gorically refused all real accommodation; she bluffed and hoped against hope to the very end. Japan fought desperately and won a qualified victory which would have been much more justly settled had it not been for the impetu-osity of the late President Roosevelt. The Treaty of Peace, which would have been signed in Peking and not at Portsmouth, had all the surrounding circumstances been properly understood, was an unfortunate instrument; like the Lansing-Ishii Notes, it was a monument of haste rather than of prescience. A wiser policy would have regarded the Scriptural in-vocation regarding peace-makers as politically unsuitable to the circumstances and left the protagonists strictly alone. Had that been done both would hav^e come to their senses and all history might have been different in the West as in the East; for both were not more than four or five months off complete exhaus-tion. Empty ammunition- wagons, depleted bat-talions, and ominous murmurs from the civil population — these are the only things that bureaucratic governments really appreciate. Neither Russia nor Japan could have faced in 1905 another winter campaign.

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IF JAPAN REFUSES!

n

We have said the Treaty of Peace should have been signed in Peking : had that been done it would not have been necessary to have had a double arrangement — one between Japan and Russia, followed by a separate ratification be-tween China and Japan. Too little attention has been directed to the action Japan took in December, 1905, in the Chinese capital : all the essential business — the business really worth recording as a result of the territorial struggle, since it involved the lord of the soil — took place here. Briefly, it was in this month of Decem-ber, 1905 — fourteen years ago — that Japan first clearly showed open political immorality. From the practical point of view all that the Ports-mouth Treaty had done, with the exception of recognizing the old Japanese claim to half of Saghalien — was to record an accomplished fact — namely, Russia 's international humiliation because of the crass failure of her army and navy. The curious connection of China with the imbroglio, arising from the circumstance that the entire war had been waged on her soil, and was directly concerned with certain grants she had been induced to make in the matter of a harbour, two railways, and the Yalu forest-

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concession — ^this curious connection was never rightfully considered, and China was treated as negligible. Manchuria being as Chinese as the metropolitan province of Chihli, a proper and decent neighbourly spirit, not to speak of expediency and foresight, should have prompted Japan to insist on the war settle-ment being a tripartite agreement to which three contracting parties — Russia, China, and Japan — put their signatures, thus doing away entirely with the past causes of friction. But this would have meant the banishment of ob-scurantism; and Japan abroad thrives on or-ganized opposition to inquiry and reform as on nothing else. To put it squarely, Japan in 1905, had she been honest, should have de-manded that the whole Manchurian railway-enterprise be retroceded to China — the trans-Manchurian lines as well as the South Man-churian — and then converted into a standard-gauge railway, after a lapse of time just suf-ficient to allow Russia to build the Amur rail-way and link up her Far Eastern possessions on her own territory. Had Japan taken this one step she would have made China her ally for all time ; trebled her influence in every part of her neighbour's vast territories; and so handicapped Westernism that it is extremely

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IF JAPAN REFUSES!

doubtful whether any further development of European or American influence or industrial enterprise would have been possible. There is also little doubt that in such circumstances the Manchu dynasty would never have fallen as it did in 1912, but would have been converted very peacefully into a constitutional monarchy. Humiliation in foreign affairs was the last straw to break the camel's back; and in this humiliation Japan played the largest part. The short-sightedness of Japanese policy, there-fore, has been the ally of republicanism in the Far East; the sponsor of Western influence; and the enemy of the peace and dignity of the Japanese Imperial House, which is to-day swaying ominously under the high winds of democratic rejolt, and may yet encounter a terrible end.

ni

The treaty which Japan signed with China December, 1905, actually consisted of the two following clauses only; that it should have been so brief shows the spirit in which Japan negotiated. The clauses read : —

Article I

The Imperial Chinese Government consent to all the transfers and assignments made by Russia to

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Japan by Articles V and VI of the Treaty of Peace above mentioned.

Article II

The Imperial Japanese Government engage that in regard to the leased territory, as well as in matters of railway construction and exploitation, they will as far as circumstances permit conform to the original agreements concluded between China and Russia. In case any question arises in the future on these sub-jects the Japanese Government will decide it in con-sultation with the Chinese Government.

Why this brevity! For very peculiar and indeed Machiavellian reasons.

No matter what the spirit of Tsarist Bussia may have been in the long struggle to reach *warm water*, it is fact that every instru-ment the Northern Power wrote with the Peking Government from 1896 to her disastrous war with Japan at least carefully preserved the fiction that enterprises on Chinese soil were held in usufruct: Russia had the use and profit but not the property. This is of the highest importance. It was specifically provided, for instance, in the Port Arthur lease (Article VI), that * * Port Arthur shall be a naval port for the sole use of Russian and Chinese men-of-war", i.e. it was an anchorage to which China had as

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IF JAPAN REFUSES?

much right as Bussia. When in 1905 this mat-ter was brought up in the Sino-Japanese nego-tiations, the Japanese plenipotentiaries imme-diately took exception to the contention, and declared that it was on record that on the only occasion during the period of the Russian lease that two Chinese cruisers had attempted to dock, the Russians had denied the right and therefore the right had lapsed. China was in a position to prove from the logbooks of the two cruisers in question that the Russian harbour authorities had signalled on the occa-sion in question ** docks occupied: no accommo-dation", and the Japanese negotiators, finally convinced that the point w^as against them, acted in a manner which sheds an interesting light on their constant professions of friend-ship for **a kindred Asiatic race'*. The naval authorities were at once given orders to strip the Port Arthur docks completely and entirely so that there should be no dockyard facilities left; and Port Arthur, which had sheltered a Russian fleet more formidable than the entire Japanese navy in 1904, was made a derelict and rated as a second-class naval station to keep the Chinese out and allow Japan gradually to assume the right of eminent domain. These are the things as they really occur in the Far

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East, — ^these are the foreign policies of Japan unmasked.

In addition to the treaty we have quoted, Japan wrote with China in 1905 a long sup-plementary agreement — ^using this method be-cause she instinctively follows tortuous ways, believing that this gives her an opportunity to defend herself against accusations of expro-priation, — and against actions which would be beneath the dignity of the Imperial House, but which her commercial appetite forces her to take.

In the supplementary treaty, Japan solemnly declared (Article II) that **in view of the earnest desire expressed by the Imperial Chi-nese Government to have the Japanese and Russian troops and railway guards in Man-churia withdrawn as soon as possible, and in order to meet this desire, the Imperial Japa-nese Government, in the event of Russia agree-ing to the withdrawal of her railway guards, or in case other proper measures are agreed to between China and Russia, consent to take similar steps accordingly". What has been the result of this undertaking? Japan has made secret agreement after secret agreement with Tsarist Russia — the last one in 1916 a few months before the Russian Revolution — ^to se-

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care at all costs that Bussia should take no such action, her recent intrigues with General Hor-vath, the Tsarist agent who is still in control of the Chinese Eastern railway, being dictated with the same aim and object, namely, to pre-vent at all costs her ** sister-nation'*, China, being repossessed of her sovereign rights. In the remaining articles of the supplementary treaty Japan annexes everything of value she can think of in Southern Manchuria, her policy being ruthless commercial and industrial ex-ploitation where Bussia was content merely to dominate. Friction between China and Japan has been ceaseless in Manchuria ever since, the smaller country never hesitating to use threats and pressure on the slightest provocation.

It was probably because of this trouble, and of the diflSculty which she experienced in an-nexing Korea, that Japan determined in 1915 to settle the results of her present belligerency with Germany in a new way. In the matter of Korea, in spite of her successful war against Bussia, she had been forced to enter into four successive conventions with the Seoul Govern-ment before the deed was completed; and dur-ing all this time the press and peoples of the Far East were in a state of uproar. There was first an agreement on 17th November, 1905,

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which placed the control and direction of the foreign relations in her hands ; another on 31st July, 1907, by which all administrative meas-ures and all high official appointments were made subject to the approval of a Japanese Resident-General; still another on 12th July, 1909, whereby the administration of justice and prisons — the essential police-power — ^was given her ; and a final one on 23d August, 1910, w^hen Korea was publicly annexed to the Japanese Empire and the Emperor of Korea deprived of his rightful title. Consequently, by filing the Twenty-one Demands almost immediately after Tsingtao had been captured, when every indi-cation from the European war-theatre pointed to a drawn war, and forcing through, by means of an ultimatum, all those clauses which did not directly conflict with the treaty rights of other Powers, Japan imagined she was safe, and would be able to do from her Shantung base — Kiaocbow — all she had done in Man-churia acting from the Port Arthur territory. The nature of the things Japan thinks she has won by means of this manoeuvre can easily be described; and it should be carefully noted that in these matters, as in all other essential political business, the German standard has been the one scrupulously followed. Japan has

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placed the Manchurian railways and the Port Arthur lease on ninety-nine-year Kiaochow terms — an action which is absj^lutely ultra vires; and moreover, she has jfot only taken over all the German enterprisKs in Shantung by force, but she has pushed'tjilRnigh, by means of loans to the Peking military party, a railway extension scheme on a German-made plan, se-cretly prepared by Germany before the Euro-pean war, aiming at making Tsingtao the sea-terminus for a railway system which at some distant date is to stretch through Central Asia and link-up with the Middle East.

The problem growing out of Manchuria and Shantung has therefore a new character. It is no longer a local Far Eastern problem: it is a world-problem which has to be faced and solved or else there will be fresh world-disaster.

IV

One final aspect has to be made clear.

Until the death of Yuan Shih-kai, Japan treated China as a country with a united gov-ernment which could be held responsible and which must be treated with; after his death she deliberately abandoned this policy and dealt with specified persons as fully-authorized

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agents whom she seduced to her point of view, and used as her instruments. No longer using the Chinese Foreign Office as her channel of communication, she boldly commenced making secret agreements with the Northern military^ party, and by means of her agents in the Min-istries of Communications and Finance has been able under cover of the World War to do untold harm/ Adopting the simple principle that the * postponed' Group V of the Twenty-one Demands was her principal business with the Republic, she has for three years sought to do piecemeal and secretly what she failed to do openly, i.e. to get into her hands, or into the hands of her agents, control of Chinese arms and munitions, control of strategic areas, con-trol of important railways and control of indus-trial monopolies. How many secret agreements in all she has made no one accurately knows; but the Arms Agreements made during the past three years and the Sino-Japanese Military Agreement of 1918 — nominally to deal with the Bolshevist threat on China 's Manchurian fron-tiers but really to bind Peking to her chariot-wheel — are notorious instruments, whilst the network of financial undertakings, made mainly

1 The reader is referred to the remarkable list of loans and mortgages in the Appendix, Document C.

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with agents of the Ministry of Communications, is so far-reaching that it is not yet properly mapped. In defiance of the precise terms of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, which calls upon her to communicate fully and frankly with her ally, Japan's watchword in Peking has been obscurantism and nothing but ob-scurantism, with disastrous results for the future well-being of the Chinese people.

And here it is necessary specially to note that until Viscount Ishii made his historic pil-grimage to Washington in 1917, and induced the United States to write the indiscreet Lansing-Ishii Notes, she was forced to hold her horses; no sooner were the Notes in her archives than she began to act in an imperious way.* China had created a so-called War Par-

iSee the Appendix, Document A, for the full text. To realize the precise value of the step Mr. Secretary Lansinit was induced to take in writing his Note to Viscount Ishii it is necessary to point out that from the Far Eastern point of view everything depends on the Chinese translation. In the case of the American official translation, communicated to the Chinese Foreign Office, ''special interests in China" was translated as meaning: to have a share in — ^to be concerned with. In the Japanese official translation, communicated to the Chinese Foreign Office in advance of the American com-munication, " specuil interests '* is translated as — specially ac-quired advantages, i.e. predominance.

In other words, by a trick. Viscount Ishii and his friends created the impression in the mind of the Chinese Government that America, faced by armed Japan, had acquiesced in Japanese hegemony in Saatern Asia and that everything was over.

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ticipation Bureau, i.e. a Special Military Office, with a number of well-equipped divisions de-pending upon it, nominally for dealing with the question of organizing an expeditionary force to proceed to France, but in reality (since it was under the control of the Northern military party) to continue the fight with the South and to crush Canton. For a number of months this amiable object was assiduously pursued, fed by funds from Japan acquired by secret agree-ments, and with not the slightest regard for China's international pledges. Although France went so far as to offer to finance a Chinese expeditionary force, division by division as they were shipped, and drew up many memo-randa to that end, Japan saw to it that the plan was killed. When intervention in Siberia seemed inevitable in May, 1918, Japan signed with the War Participation Bureau the secret Sino-Japanese military agreement in a last effort to defeat America's plan of helping Russia.^ By creating a new international im-broglio in which railways, Bolsheviks, and

1 For the full text of the Sino-Japanese Secret Military and Naval Conventions, and the secret Arms Contracts, see Documents B and D in the Appendix, with explanatory notes attached. No impartial critic can deny, after studying these dark doings^ that the whole structure of Japanese foreign policy must be changed if she is to be treated on equal terms by the rest of the world.

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Tsarists of the stamp of General Horvath would be so mixed as to defy a solution, she added to the chaos beyond Lake Baikal; and since the triumph of the Allies and the armistice of the 11th November, by forcing the Peking Government to rename this office the National Defence Bureau, she has managed to retain it as the headquarters for Japanese intrigues. Among recent secret agreements signed by the corrupt generals attached to it is said to be one relating to Fuhkien province, which is reported to place that strategically important zone, which dominates the island of Formosa, on a quasi-Manchurian footing.

This challenge to the world's decency and honour can no longer be disregarded; it must be taken up, since imperialist Germany cannot be considered properly crushed until her copied methods have been eradicated from the Far East.

The root of the evil lies in the present nature of the Japanese Government; in the fact that under the present Constitution it is perfectly legitimate for the Japanese Ministry of War to direct the Empire's policy in China and to be above the control of the Diet.^ A Japanese

1 Vide the extracts from the Japanese Constitution in Doca-ment H, Appendix.

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Cabinet, directly responsible to the Diet under the Constitution, is absolutely essential to the peace and happiness of the Far East; unless that, as well as a proper extension of the fran-chise, can be acquired by constitutional means, it is essential to oppose Japanese intimidation of China by methods other than these adopted during the war.

For it is force that is behind the Japanese programme — not equity or justice, but force, mixed with corruption. This force is to-day semi-antiquated; for Japanese armaments are still much where they were after the Russo-Japanese War, and are totally unequal to the challenge offered to first-class maritime Powers with great interests to protect in the Far East. Indeed, it is obvious to observers on the spot that the asset of geographical isolation has been exhausted and if the League of Nations is to have meaning and reality in the East as in the West there is a method available which would instantly change the situation.

Grey battleships on the horizon-line would bring home to Japanese leaders what all the butchery of the war has failed to teach: too long have the waters of the Yellow Sea been without adequate protection.

Japan indeed stands at the cross-roads. It

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is for her to elect what her future is to be; whether the bacillus of imperialism is to be blown out by explosion, or dissipated by re-form. Korea cried aloud for decent treatment — Korea can to-day rightfully demand either Home-rule or proper representation of her peo-ple in Japan's Diet. Here, if there ever was a case, is a country which should be admin-istered only under a mandatory derived from a League of Nations ; for what has Korea done that she should be treated as a conquered prov-ince! and why should Manchuria and the province containing the birthplace of Confucius — Shantung — be menaced by the same fate ! It is not true that these regions are necessary for the overspill of the Japanese population; for they are densely populated and are not attracting Japanese immigrants. Korea, which has been under the Japanese heel for fifteen years, has to-day less than 400,000 Japanese immigrants, or a net increase of 300,000 per-sons since the Russo-Japanese War. During this period the Korean population has in-creased by over 3,000,000, and in less than two decades the land will be far more crowded than Japan. In the case of Manchuria, experience has not only conclusively proved that the Japa-nese cannot compete as farmers with the Chi-

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nese — that is, they cannot go on the land — btft in petty trade the Chinese are ousting them, the Japanese being able to retain their hold only by a system of preferential treatment and anti-Chinese regulation which they assiduously enact in the Port Arthur leased territory and along the zone of the South Manchuria railway in a last eflfort to justify their claims. As for Shantung, that has long been so densely popu-lated by the native race that vast numbers of men must go annually to other provinces — ^par-ticularly to Manchuria — to find food, the vil-lages in Shantung being so thick on the ground as to form continuous chains. It is not suf-ficiently known that since 1900 the population of China has increased by 68 millions — that is, by considerably more than either the present population of Germany or Japan; and that by the middle of the present century the Chinese cannot number less than 600 millions. Although Japan's northernmost island of Hokkaido is practically uninhabited and could carry 12 mil-lion people at the lowest competition, she vainly tries to push her people on to the Asiatic mainland so as to justify her so-called Asiatic Monroe Doctrine, which means for her not the protection but the subjection of the East. Hat-ing to go abroad save to the white man's lands,

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where they earn great profits rapidly and easily, the Japanese care so little for their an-nexed territories that the Japanese population of Formosa has long boon stationary if it has not actually receded. Town-dwellers by in-stinct; leaving much of their agriculture to women, who labour early and late in the fields, for them foreign parts have no attractions. Colonization is indeed alien to their natures; it is their military leaders who are trying al-most by force to make them build a fabric of empire in the extraordinary manner we have indicated.

There is no more to be said — not a word. We have placed the problem under the searchlight ; we hav^e indicated the solution, if there is jus-tice enough left over after Europe has settled her own troubles, Eastern Asia is surely the first claimant. For unless that precious qual-ity is used in abundance, the day is not far distant when the crash will come and men must fight again.

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