self so efficaciously that she can now all but dispense with outside tuition. Her railways were built and run, in the first place, by foreigners. There is at present not a single alien employed upon them. In her cotton mills, where the produce of over half-a-million spindles is challenging the command of the Far-Eastern market, there is a similarly notable absence. In the recent war her soldiers fought with rifles patented and manufactured, not in Europe, but in Japan. Every cartridge, every shot and shell, nay, even the Maxim guns employed, were of Japanese origin. Less than half-a-dozen Europeans are now engaged in the arsenals. When I first visited Japan in 1887, she possessed but a few lines of steamboats, and those for the most part, if not entirely, captained and engineered by Englishmen and Scotchmen. She has now several firstrate lines of steamers, subsidised by the Government, running to every port in the Far East, and wholly officered by natives. Her proximity to the immense and only halfdeveloped market of China, the skill of her artificers, the low rate of wages and the long hours for which they are content to work, give her an advantage with which no European rival can cope. She has a currency which is not fettered by international or imperial exigencies, but which she can regulate to suit her own fiscal needs. I do not mean to say that there is not another side to the picture, or, if the trade of Europe meets with a set-back in these respects, that there are not other channels of recuperation or untapped markets still waiting to be conquered. Japan herself must, for a long time at any rate, be dependent upon Europe for a good deal of the raw material which she proposes to work up. A programme of shipbuilding or of railway construction, or public works, or factories and mills, cannot be carried out without an appeal to European For a while these exchanges may resource and invention. constitute an equipoise. expect to forge ahead of her rivals in the China Seas; and, whatever may have then become of the political balance of power, she will have laid a hand upon the commercial scales that will cause many a moment of disquiet in the countinghouses of the West. In this brilliant and lucrative career, the war with China, which was undertaken with far different objects, may one day be reckoned as marking a very conspicuous stage. CHAPTER XIII THE DESTINIES OF THE FAR EAST Prudens futuri temporis exitum Ridetque si mortalis ultra Fas trepidat. Quod adest, memento HORACE: Carm. iii. 29. In the two remaining chapters I propose briefly to sum up the conclusions to which I have endeavoured to lead the readers of this book, and, in so far as they Summary. appear to justify so venturesome an enterprise, to cast the horoscope of the future. I desire also to indicate the part that is now being played, or is likely hereafter to be played, on the majestic stage to which I have invited attention, by the Government and the citizens of my own country. In this first portion of my study of the kingdoms of the Far East I have dealt with three States alone-Japan, Korea, and China. Of these, Japan and China are powerful Empires (though in very different senses of the term) whose orbit in the firmament of nations may claim a certain fixity, and whose national existence, in spite of the fact that their political boundaries are liable to modification, is not likely at any time to be submerged. Korea, on the contrary, belongs to a class of States of whom future fixity is the last attribute to be predicated, and before whom an anxious course of vicissitudes, in no degree diminished by the issue of the recent conflict, opens. Though nominally independent, her territories are still occupied and will probably again be overrun by the armies of one or another of her jealous neighbours. She is too feeble and too corrupt to stand alone. They have successfully interfered to prevent her from leaning upon China. Will Japan be content to let her lean upon Russia? Will Russia acquiesce in her leaning upon Japan? The main result of the war has been to leave Korea, in an even greater degree than it found her, the powder-magazine of the Far East. The future of Japan. The superficial features of Japanese character and politics are known to all. Her nimble-witted and light-hearted people, the romantic environment of her past, and the astonishing rapidity with which she is assimilating all that the West has to teach her, have been praised with an indiscriminate prodigality that has already begun to pall, and has not been without its. bad effects upon herself. I conceive that no worse service could have been rendered to Japan than the publication of the last work in English which has been dedicated to her charms by a well-known English writer and poet. These overloaded encomiums not merely cloy the palate; they foster a growing vanity against which the Japanese require to be upon their guard, and which may, unless abated, both provoke and deserve the chastisement of some smart rebuff. Japan is sure enough of a distinguished and even brilliant future, without being told that she has exhausted the sum of all human excellences in the present. Moreover, a time of internal fermentation lies before her in the attempt to graft a purely democratic product on to a stem from which the feudal sap has not been entirely expunged, and to reconcile the widest aspirations of constitutional liberty with the relics of a theocratic régime. This struggle will require the fullest measure of sense and self-control, and may, perhaps, not be tided over without crisis and suffering. From such a trial the patriotism of her people and the liberal sentiments of her statesmen are capable of bringing her forth, if not unscarred, at least with vitality unexhausted; and that in the course of the next quarter of a century she will take her place on a level of technical equality with the great Powers of the West may be accepted as certain. The Revision of the Treaties, effected just as these pages originally passed into the printer's hands, will free her from all artificial trammels, and while ratifying, will also test her right to international autonomy. The Great Japan was frequently blamed before the war for squandering too much money upon armaments, military and naval, and for neglecting the requirements of industrial and commercial expansion. It is true that her resources are capable of very considerable development, and that a prudent finance, already in part inaugurated, will greatly increase both the numbers and the prosperity of her people. But the critics to whom I allude had lost sight of the part which Japan aspires to play in the Far East, and to which her policy of expenditure and organisation has been strictly subordinated. That part is determined by her geographical situation. Placed at a maritime coign of vantage upon the flank of Asia, precisely analogous to that occupied by Great Britain on the flank of Europe, exercising a powerful influence over the adjoining continent, but not necessarily involved in its responsibilities, she sets before herself the supreme ambition of becoming, on a smaller scale, the Britain of the Far East. By means of an army strong enough to defend our shores, and to render invasion unlikely, and still more of a navy |