handles the vermilion pencil in the halls of the Forbidden City, or whether for the proclamations of the Son of Heaven is substituted the ukase of a Muscovite Tsar, that expansion, like the swelling of the sap within the rind, will continue. But extension of race is not the same thing as extension of empire, and physical multiplication may even be a symptom of political decline. The extinction of China is impossible and absurd. A population of 350,000,000 human souls. cannot be extirpated or bodily transferred. On the contrary, I believe it will increase, and swell, and continue to overflow. But in this movement I detect no seed of empire, and I foresee no ultimate peril for the White Race.

Race and empire.

On the contrary, I think it may be argued that European administration and protection are essential conditions for the continuance of that very progress which is supposed to constitute their peril. It is in British communities and under the security of British rule that the expansion of Chinese energies has hitherto attained its maximum development. Why is the Yellow Race to turn round and rend its benefactors? Why is it to destroy the very system to secure which it acquiesces in expatriation from its own country, and to erect a reproduction of that from which it has fled? To me it appears no more improbable that Chinamen should continue to accept European domination, in any country to which the overflow of population may propel the emigrant stream, than is the spectacle of their present condition in Hongkong or Singapore. The Yellow belt in the Far East may conceivably snatch from the White the bulk of the spoils of commerce, and the best of the wages of toil; but that it will ever seriously clutch at the keys of empire, or

challenge the racial dominion of the West, I am quite unable to believe.1

Is Japan the enemy?

tention.

There remains a modification, or rather a complete metamorphosis of Mr. Pearson's argument, which some of his disciples, anxious to cover the inglorious retreat enforced by the Chinese collapse, have endeavoured to substitute for the original conThis is the happy thought' that what Mr. Pearson originally said of China may ultimately turn out to be true of Japan, which was barely mentioned by him, and of whose rise to greatness he seems to have been unaware. Japan, according to this hypothesis, is to be the triumphant bearer of the Yellow flag, which she has torn from the hands of China, in the impending campaign against the White ensign in the Asiatic tropics. I am not here concerned to deal minutely with this suggestion, which lies outside of my own argument in this chapter, and which is the outcome of a hasty ratiocination upon the results of the recent war. But I may say in passing that I disbelieve in it for a number of reasons. The Japanese have not, and are not likely for many generations to possess, the requisite numbers. They are lacking in colonising (though certainly not in commercial) energy, and in the hereditary instinct for expansion. Nor in their long and dramatic history is there any indication of capacity to rule or educate subject races of different blood. All their most valuable national properties they have acquired from, not given to, others.

1 Sir A. Lyall (loc. cit.) meets these conclusions by the hypothesis of a Chinese regeneration, as the result of the war with Japan. Until, however, even a single one of the ifs and mays is replaced by an is, I prefer not to share these dreams.

CHAPTER XIV

GREAT BRITAIN IN THE FAR EAST

Grave mother of majestic works,

From her isle-altar gazing down,

Who, God-like, grasps the triple forks,
And, king-like, wears the crown.

TENNYSON.

The role of Great Britain.

PERHAPS the most gratifying reflection suggested by these observations on the more distant kingdoms of the Asiatic continent is the part that must inevitably be played in their future by this country. The inhabitants of a small island on the face of the northern seas, we exercise, owing to the valour of our ancestors and the intrepid spirit of our merchants, a controlling suffrage in the destinies of the Far East. That influence may, fortunately, be employed in the undivided interests of peace. Friendly relations between ourselves and Japan will assist her in that mercantile and industrial development in which she is following in our own footsteps, at the same time that it will confirm to us the continued command of the ocean routes. A similar attitude towards China will strengthen her in a resistance, for which there is yet time, against the only enemy whom she has real cause to fear, and will facilitate our own commercial access to her territories by land. Warfare with Russia need only ensue from attacks made upon British interests or British territory elsewhere, and assuredly will not be provoked by ourselves.

The possibilities of dispute with France, with which I shall deal in my next volume, are dependent upon her own action, which, if it is confined to the regions at present under her sway, and respects the liberties of intervening States, need awake no protest from England. Whatever the future may bring forth, to this country it cannot fail to be a matter of capital importance, seeing that the Empire of Great Britain, though a European, a Canadian, and an Australian, is before all else an Asiatic dominion. We still are, and have it in our hands to remain, the first Power in the East. Just as De Tocqueville remarked that the conquest and government of India are really the achievements which have given to England her place in the opinion of the world, so it is the prestige and the wealth arising from her Asiatic position that are the foundation stones of the British Empire. There, in the heart of the old Asian continent, she sits upon the throne that has always ruled the East. Her sceptre is outstretched over land and sea. 'Godlike,' she 'grasps the triple forks, and, king-like, wears the crown.'

Reflex influence upon England.

But not only are we politically concerned in the evolution of these complex problems by reason of our Imperial situation in Hindustan : our own fellow-citizens are personal actors in the drama which I have described, and the reflex action which it exercises upon them is a subject of study not less interesting than the part which they play, or are capable of playing, themselves. Englishmen and English influence have been taken to the Far East by one of three purposes-commerce, the diffusion of the faith of Christ, or the responsibilities of empire. In the first category we are the heirs of the Portuguese and the Dutch, of whom the former survive only at the dilapidated port of Macao, while the latter, in their island possessions,

lie outside of the track which I have been examining. From the former, too, we inherited the self-imposed duty of carrying the cross which has sent our missionaries into all lands, and which, if it inspires the enthusiasm of Exeter Hall, is a source of not inferior anxiety to Downing Street. In the domain of empire the conquest of India has carried us forward on a tide of inevitable advance that leaves us knocking at the inland door of China and overlapping the northern frontier of Siam. The wars at the end of the last century and in the first half of this, which were part of that Expansion of England which has been so ably portrayed by a contemporary historian, gave us Singapore, which, lying on the ocean highway from West to East, is the greatest coaling station of the Orient, and Hongkong, which is the second port of the British Empire. It has not been without war that we have won even a mercantile entry into those countries at whose Treaty Ports our flag is now in the ascendant, and which have benefited by our intercourse with them not less than we ourselves.

Commercial supremacy of

Great

Britain.

I have shown by figures in the course of this book, in the cases both of Japan and China, that the commercial supremacy of Great Britain in the Far Eastern seas, though sharply assailed by an ever-increasing competition, has not as yet been seriously shaken, When we learn that out of the 3340 vessels that passed through the Suez Canal in 1893, no fewer than 2400 were British, while next on the list came the Germans with 270, the French with 190, and the Dutch with 180, we may form some idea of the extent to which that ascendency is still pushed in Eastern waters. How vital is its maintenance, not merely for the sake of our Empire, but for the sustenance of our people, no arguments are needed to prove. It is only in the