PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC BY FRANK FOX AUTHOR OF "RAMPARTS OF EMPIRE" NEWS EDITOR OF THE "MORNING POST," ETC. BOSTON SMALL MAYNARD AND COMPANY PUBLISHERS CONTENTS HAP. PAGE 1 . THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE ^S . . I 2. RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC . . . 1 6 3. THE RISE OF JAPAN .... 31 4. CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA . . 47 5. THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER \ . .66 6. GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC . . 85 7. THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC / . . IOO 8. NEW ZEALAND AND THE SMALLER BRITISH PACIFIC COLONIES . . . . . .I2O 9. THE NATIVE RACES . . . . .136 10. LATIN AMERICA . . . . .147 11. CANADA AND THE PACIFIC . . . .165 12. THE NAVIES OF THE PACIFIC . . . . 176 * V_/ 13. THE ARMIES OF THE PACIFIC. . . 1 86 14. TREATIES IN THE PACIFIC . . . .199 15. THE PANAMA CANAL . . . . 2l6 1 6. THE INDUSTRIAL POSITION IN THE PACIFIC . . 228 17. SOME STRATEGICAL CONSIDERATIONS . . . 245 1 8. THE RIVALS ...... 263 261234 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC CHAPTER I THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE THE Pacific is the ocean of the future. As civilisa- tion grows and distances dwindle, man demands a larger and yet larger stage for the fighting-out of the ambitions of races. The Mediterranean sufficed for the settlement of the issues between the Turks and the Christians, between the Romans and the Cartha- ginians, between the Greeks and the Persians, and who knows what other remote and unrecorded struggles of the older peoples of its littoral. Then the world became too great to be kept in by the Pillars of Hercules, and Fleets in the service alike of peace and war ranged over the Atlantic. The Mediterranean lost its paramount importance, and dominance of the Atlantic became the test of world supremacy. Now greater issues and greater peoples demand an even greater stage. On the bosom of the Pacific will be decided, in peace or in war, the next great struggle of civilisation, which will give as its prize if :/< PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC the supremacy of the world. Shall it go to the White Race or the Yellow Race ? If to the White Race, will it be under the British Flag, or the flag of the United States, or of some other nation ? That is the problem of the Pacific. Since Cortes first looked on the waters of the ocean from a peak in Darien, since Balboa of Castile waded into its waters and claimed them for the dominion of the King of Castile, events have rushed forward with bewildering haste to transfer the centre of the world's interest to the Pacific. Cortes in his day looked to a North Pacific coast inhabited by a few wandering Indians. (The powerful national organisation of Mexico had not extended its influence as far as the Pacific coast.) Now there stretch along that coast the Latin- American Power of Mexico, doomed, probably, to be absorbed before the great issue of Pacific dominance is decided, but having proved under Diaz some capacity for organisation ; the gigantic Power of the United States with the greatest resources of wealth and material force ever possessed by a single nation of the world ; and the sturdy young Power of Canada. To the South, Cortes looked to a collection of Indian States, of which Peru was the chief, boasting a gracious but unwarlike civilisation, doomed to utter destruction at the hands of Spain. Now that stretch of Pacific littoral is held by a group of Latin- American nations, the possibilities of which it is difficult ac- curately to forecast, but which are in some measure THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 3 formidable if Chili is accepted as a standard by which to judge, though, on the whole, they have shown so far but little capacity for effective national organ- isation. Looking westward, Cortes in his day could see nothing but darkness. It was surmised rather than known that there lay the Indies, the kingdoms of the Cham of Tartary and the great Mogul, lands which showed on the horizon of the imagination, half real, half like the fantasy of a mirage. To-day the west coast of the Pacific is held by the European Power of Russia ; by the aspiring Asiatic Power of Japan, which within half a century has forgotten the use of the bow and the fan in warfare and hammered its way with modern weapons into the circle of the world's great Powers ; by China, stirring uneasily and grasping at the same weapons which won greatness for Japan ; by a far-flung advance guard of the great Power of the United States in the Philippines, won accidentally, held grimly ; by England's lonely out- posts, Australia and New Zealand, where less than five millions of the British race hold a territory almost as large as Europe. Sprinkled over the surface of the ocean, between East and West, are various fortresses or trading stations, defending interests or arousing cupidities. Germany and France are represented. The United States holds Hawaii, the key to the Pacific coast of North America, either for offence or defence. Great Britain has Fiji and various islets. The Japanese 4 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Power stretches down towards the Philippines with the recent acquisition of Formosa. Here are seen all the great actors in European rivalry. Added to them are the new actors in world- politics, who represent the antagonism of the Yellow Race to the White Race. Before all is dangled the greatest temptation to ambition and cupidity. Who is master of the Pacific, who has the control of its trade, the industrial leadership of its peoples, the disposal of its warrior forces, will be master of the world. It is a problem not only of navies and armies (though with our present defective civilisation these are the most important factors) : it is a problem also of populations and their growth, of industries, of the development of natural resources, of trade and commerce. The Pacific littoral is in part unpeopled, in part undeveloped, unorganised, unappropriated. Its Asiatic portion must change, it is changing, from a position which may be compared with that of Japan fifty years ago to a position such as Japan's to-day. Its American and Australian portion must develop power and wealth surpassing that of Europe. Under whose leadership will the change be made ? To discuss that question is the purpose of this book : and at the outset the lines on which the discussion will proceed and the conclusions which seem to be inevitable may be foreshadowed. At one time Russia seemed destined to the hegemony of the Pacific. Yet she was brought to the Pacific coast by accident rather than by design. THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 5 Her natural destiny was westward and southward rather than eastward, though it was natural that she should slowly permeate the Siberian region. As far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (the Elizabethan epoch in Anglo-Saxon history), the curious celi- bate military organisation of the Cossacks had won much of Siberia for the Czars. But there was no dream then, nor at a very much later period, of penetration to the Pacific. European jealousy of Russia, a jealousy which is explainable only with the reflection that vast size naturally fills with awe the human mind, stopped her advance towards the Mediterranean. In the north her ports were useless in winter. In the south she was refused a development of her territory which was to her mind natural and just. Thus thwarted, Russia groped in a blind way from the Siberian provinces which had been won by the Cossacks towards a warm- water port in Asia. At first the movement was southward and filled England with alarm as to the fate of India. Then it turned eastward, and in Manchuria and Corea this European Power seemed to find its destiny. But Japan was able to impose an effective check upon Russian ambitions in the Far East. At the present moment Russia has been sup- planted in control of the Asiatic seaboard by Japan. Japan has everything but money to equip her for a bold bid for the mastery of the Pacific before the completion of the Panama Canal. Europe has taught to Japan, in addition to the material arts of warfare, 6 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC a cynical faith in the moral value, indeed, the necessity, of war to national welfare. She considers that respect is only to be gained by war : that war with a European nation is an enterprise of small risk : that in short her experience with the Russian Fleet was fairly typical of war with any European Power. She believes that she has the most thoroughly efficient army and navy, considering their size, in the world ; and has much to justify the belief. This ambition and the warlike confidence of Japan constitute to-day a more important factor in the problem of the Pacific than her actual fighting strength. But the check to prompt decisive action on her part is that of poverty. Japan is very poor. The last war, in spite of great gain of prestige, brought no gain of money. Its cost bled her veins white, and there was no subsequent transfusion in the shape of a Russian indemnity. Nor are the natural resources of Japan such as to hold out much hope of a quick industrial prosperity. She has few minerals. Her soil is in the bulk wretchedly poor. From the territories control of which she has won in battle- Manchuria and Corea she will reap some advantage by steadily ignoring the " open door " obligation in trade, and by dispossessing the native peasantry. But it cannot be very great. There is no vast natural wealth to be exploited. The native peasantry can be despoiled and evicted, but the booty is trifling and the cost of the process not inconsiderable since even the Corean will shoot from his last ditch. THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 7 Japan is now seeking desperately a material pros- perity by industrial expansion. A tariff and bounty system, the most rigid and scientific the world knows, aims to make the country a great textile-weaving, ship-building, iron-making country. The smallest scrap of an industry is sedulously nurtured, and Japanese matches, Japanese soap, Japanese beer, penetrate to the markets of the outer world as evidence of the ambition of the people to be manu- facturers. But when one explores down to bedrock, the only real bases for industrial prosperity in Japan are a supply of rather poor coal and a great volume of cheap labour. The second is of some value in cheap production, but it is yet to be found possible to build up national prosperity on the sole basis of cheap labour. Further, with the growth of modernity in Japan, there is naturally a labour movement. Doctrines of Socialism are finding followers : strikes are heard of occasionally. The Japanese artisan and coolie may not be content to slave unceasingly on wages which deny life all comfort, to help a method of national aggrandisement the purport of which they can hardly understand. The position of Japan in the Pacific has to be con- sidered, therefore, in the light of the future rather than of the present. At the time of the conclusion of the war with Russia it seemed supreme. Since then it has steadily deteriorated. If she had succeeded in the realisation of her ambition to undertake the direction of China's military and industrial reorganisa- 8 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC tion, the Japanese Power would have been firmly established for some generations at least. But the defects in her national character prevented that. Inspiring no confidence among the Chinese, the Japanese found all attempts at peaceful assumption of a controlling influence in China checked by sullen antipathy ; and a forced assumption would not have been tolerated by Europe. It will not be found possible, on a full survey of the facts, to credit Japan with the power to hold a supreme place in the Pacific. She is, even now, among the dwindling Powers. China, on the other hand, has the possibilities of a mighty future. To-day she is in the throes of nation- birth. To-morrow she may unbind her feet and pre- pare to join in the race for supremacy. The bringing of China into the current of modern life will not be an easy task, but it is clearly not an impossible one. Before the outbreak of the present Revolution (which may place China among the democratic Republics of the world), the people of the Celestial Empire had begun to reconsider seriously their old attitude of intolerance towards European civilisation. To under- stand fully the position of China it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the actual Chinese nation, some 400,000,000 of people, enervated as were the Peruvians of South America, by a system of theocratic and pacific Socialism, were subjected about 250 years ago to the sovereignty of the Manchus, a warrior race from the Steppes. Since then the Manchus have governed China, tyrannously, incompetently, on THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 9 the strength of a tradition of military superiority stronger far than the Raj by which the British have held India. But the Manchus in numbers and in intellect far inferior to the Chinese forgot in time their military enterprise and skill. The tradition of it, however, remained until the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed that the Manchu military power was contemptible not only against the white foreigner, but also against the Japanese parvenu. Patient China, finding her tyrant to be a weak despot, revolts now, not only against the Manchu dynasty, but also against the Conservatism which has kept her from emulating Japan's success in the world. At present the power of China in the Pacific is negligible. In the future it may be the greatest single force in that ocean. Almost certainly it may be reckoned to take the place of Japan as the chief Asiatic factor. Japan and China having been considered, the rest of Asia is negligible as affecting the destiny of the Pacific except in so far as India can serve as basis of action for British power. An independent Indian nation is hardly one of the possibilities of the future. Religious, racial, and caste distinctions make a united, independent India at present impossible. Unless the British Power carries too far a tendency to conciliate the talking tribes of the Hindoo peninsula at the expense of the fighting tribes, it should hold India by right of a system of government which is good 10 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC though not perfect, and by reason of the impossibility of suggesting any substitute. In the event of a failure of the British Power, India would still, in all probability, fail to take a place among the great nations of the earth. Either she would fall a victim to some other nation or relapse into the condition, near to anarchy, which was hers before the coming of the Europeans. It is not possible to imagine to-day any European Power other than Great Britain with the possible exception of Russia becoming strongly established in the Pacific. France and Germany have footholds certainly. But in neither case is the territory held by them possible of great development, and in neither case is there a chain of strategic stations to connect the Pacific colony with the Mother Country. The despatch of the German " mailed fist " to Kiao- Chou in China some years ago is still remembered as one of the comic rather than the serious episodes of history. The squadron bearing to the Chinese the martial threat of the German Emperor had to beg its way from one British coaling station to another because of the lack of German ports. The influence of South America in the Pacific need not yet be calculated. It is a possible far- future factor in the problem ; and the completion of Trans-Andine railways may quickly enhance the importance of Chili and Peru. But for the present South America can take no great part in the Pacific struggle. THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 11 It is when British influence and American influence in the Pacific come to be considered that the most important factors in the contest for its supremacy enter upon the stage. Let us consider, for the nonce, the two Powers separately. The British Empire holding Australia and New Zealand with an audacious but thin garrison ; having a long chain of strategic stations such as Hong Kong and Singapore ; having in India a powerful rear base for supplies ; holding a great part of the North- West Coast of America with a population as yet scanty but beginning to develop on the same lines as the Australasian people is clearly well situated to win and to hold the mastery of the Pacific. Such mastery would have to be inspired with peaceful ideals ; it could not survive as an aggressive force. It is indeed the main strength of the British position in the Pacific that it is naturally anxious, not for a disturbance but for a preservation of the present state of things, which gives to the British Empire all that a reasonable ambition could require. It is wise and easy to be peaceable when one has all the best of the spoils. For a secure British mastery of the Pacific, India would need to be held with the military assistance of South Africa and A ustralia, and made a great naval base ; Australia and New Zealand would need to be populated seriously; Canada would need to be guarded against absorption by the United States and its new population kept as far as possible to the 12 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC British type ; the friendship and co-operation of the United States would need to be sought. Turning next to the United States it will be re- cognised that she has in a realised form all the force and wealth possible to an organised China or a fully developed Australia. She has one hundred million people, who have reached the highest stage of civilised organisation. Their material wealth and wealth counts for much in modern war is almost incalculable. Their national ambition has never been checked by defeat. Lately it has been fed with foreign war and territorial conquest and it has found the taste good. The American people face the future possessed of all the material for a policy of aggressive Imperialism and with a splendidly youthful faith in their own good motives, a faith which can justify an action better than any degree of cynicism. There is as much of the "old Adam" in them as in the peoples of any of the "effete monarchies," and many circumstances seem to point to them as anxious to take the lead among the White Races in the future. As regards the Pacific, American ambition is clear. The United States holds the Philippines at great expense of treasure and blood. She is fortifying Honolulu, with the idea of making it a naval base " stronger than Gibraltar." 1 She is cutting the Panama 1 Since the above was written it is reported that the United States has taken possession of Palmyra Island once a British possession to the south of Honolulu, obviously for strategic purposes. THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 13 Canal and fortifying the entrances with the probable purpose of giving to the United States a monopoly of that gateway in time of war. With splendid audacity the American despises secrecy in regard to his future plans. In New York Naval Yard three years ago I was informed, with an amplitude of detail that was convincing, of the United States' scheme for patrolling the whole Pacific with her warships when the Canal had been finished. Supposing, then, the United States to continue her present industrial and commercial progress ; sup- posing her to gradually tighten her hold on the rest of the American continent ; supposing her to overcome certain centrifugal forces now at work, the problem of the Pacific, should the United States decide to play a " lone hand," will be solved. It will become an American lake, probably after a terrible struggle in which the pretensions of the Yellow Races will be shattered, possibly after another fratricidal struggle in which the British possessions in the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand, equally with Canada, will be forced to obedience. But is there any necessity to consider the United States and the British Empire as playing mutually hostile parts in the Pacific? They have been the best of friends there in the past. They have many good reasons to remain friends in the future. A dis- cussion as to whether the Pacific Ocean is destined to be controlled by the American or by the British Power could be reasonably ended with the query : 14 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Why not by an Anglo-Celtic union representing both? An Anglo- Celtic alliance embracing Great Britain, the United States and the British Dominions, would settle in the best way the problem of the Pacific. No possible combination, Asiatic, European, or Asia- European, could threaten its position. But there are certain difficulties in the way, which will be discussed later. For the present, it has only to be insisted that both Powers are potential rather than actual masters of the Pacific. Neither in the case of Great Britain nor of the United States is a great Pacific force at the moment established. After her treaty with Japan, Great Britain abandoned for a while the idea of maintaining any serious naval strength in the Pacific. The warships she main- tained there, on the Australian station and elsewhere, had no fighting value against modern armaments, and were kept in the Pacific as a step towards the scrap-heap. That policy has since been reversed, and the joint efforts of Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand directed towards re-establishing British Pacific naval strength. At the moment, however, the actual British naval force in the Pacific is incon- siderable, if obsolete or obsolescent vessels are ruled out of consideration. The United States also has no present naval force in the Pacific that could contest the issue with even a fraction of the Japanese navy. Clearly, too, she has no intention of attempt- ing the organisation of a powerful Pacific Fleet THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE 15 separate from her Atlantic Fleet, but aims at the bolder policy of holding her interests in both oceans by one great Fleet which will use the Panama Canal to mobilise at an emergency in either. If the resources of the present with their probable growth in the future are taken into account, Great Britain and the United States will appear as massing enormous naval and military forces in the Pacific. The preponderance of naval force will be probably on the side of the United States for very many years since it is improbable that Great Britain will ever be able to detach any great proportion of her Fleet from European waters and her Pacific naval force will be comprised mainly of levies from Australia and New Zealand, and possibly Canada, India, and South Africa. The preponderance of military force will be probably on the side of Great Britain, taking into count the citizen armies of Australia and New Zealand (and possibly of Canada) and the great forces available in India. Complete harmony between Great Britain and the United States in the Pacific would thus give the hegemony of the ocean to the Anglo-Saxon race. Rivalry between them might lead to another result. In the natural course of events that " other result " might be Asiatic dominion in one form or another. These factors in Pacific rivalry will be discussed in detail in the following chapters. CHAPTER II RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC RUSSIA, for generations the victim of Asia, when at last she had won to national greatness, was impelled by pressure from the West rather than by a sense of requital to turn back the tide of invasion. That pressure from the West was due to a misunder- standing in which Great Britain led the way, and which the late Lord Salisbury happily described when he stated that England " had backed the wrong horse" in opposing Russia and in aiding Turkey against her. Russia, because she broke Napoleon's career of victory by her power of resistance, a power which was founded on a formlessness of national life rather than a great military strength, was credited by Europe with a fabulous might. Properly understood, the successful Russian resistance to the greatest of modern captains was akin to that of an earthwork which absorbs the sharpest blows of artillery and remains unmoved, almost unharmed. But it was misinterpreted, and a mental conception formed of the Russian earthwork as a mobile, aggressive force eager to move forward and to overwhelm Europe. 16 RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 17 Russia's feat of beating back the tide of Napoleonic invasion was merely the triumph of a low bio- logical type of national organism. Yet it inspired Europe with a mighty fear. The " Colossus of the North " came into being to haunt every Chancellery. Nowhere was the fear felt more acutely than in Great Britain. It is a necessary consequence of the British Imperial expansion of the past, an expansion that came about very often in spite of the Mother Country's reluctance and even hostility, that Great Britain must now always view with distrust, with suspicion, that country which is the greatest of the European Continental Powers for the time being, whether it be France, Russia, or Germany. If British foreign policy is examined carefully it will be found to have been based on that guiding principle for many generations. Whatever nation appears to aim at a supreme position in Europe must be con- fronted by Great Britain. Sometimes British statesmen, following instinctively a course which was set for them by force of circum- stances, have not recognised the real reason of their actions. They have imagined that there was some ethical warrant for the desire for a European "balance of power." They have seen in the malignant dis- position of whatever nation was the greatest Power in Europe for the time being a just prompting to arrange restraining coalitions, to wage crippling wars. But the truth is that the British race, with so much 18 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC that is desirable of the earth under its flag, with indeed almost all the good empty lands in its keep- ing, must be jealous of the next European Power. On the other hand, every growing Power in Europe must look with envy on the rich claim which one prospector, and that one not the earliest, has pegged out in the open fields of the world. Thus between Great Britain and the next European Power in rank there is always a mutual jealousy. The growing Power is credited with a desire to seize the rich lands of the British Empire ; and generally has the desire. The holding Power is apprehensive of every step forward of any rival, seeing in it a threat to her Empire's security. There is such a thing in this world as being too rich to be comfortable. That is Great Britain's national position. Thus when the power of France was broken and Napoleon was safely shut up in St Helena, the British nation, relieved of one dread, promptly found another. Russia was credited with designs on India. She was supposed to be moving south towards the Mediterranean, and her object in seeking to be estab- lished there was obviously to challenge British naval supremacy, and to capture British overseas colonies. British diplomacy devoted itself sternly to the task of checkmating Russia. Russia, the big blundering amorphous nation, to whom England had given, some generations before, early promptings to national organisation, and who now sprawled clumsily across Europe groping for a way out of her ice-chains RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 19 towards a warm -water port, became the traditional enemy of the British Empire. This idea of Russian rivalry grew to be an obsession. The melodramas of the British people had for their favourite topic the odious cruelty of Russian tyranny. If a submarine cable to a British colony were inter- rupted, or a quarry explosion startled the air, the colonists at once turned their thoughts to a Russian invasion, and mobilised their volunteers. Colonists of this generation can remember the thrills of early childhood, when more than once they " prepared for the Russians," and the whole force of some hundreds of volunteers and cadets determined to sell their lives dearly on the battlefield to keep Russian knouts from the backs of their womenfolk, it being seriously con- sidered that the Russian always celebrated a victory by a general knouting. Not until the idea of Russia establishing a hegemony over Europe had been dissipated by the Russo-Japanese War did British statesmanship really discover qualities of good neighbourliness in the Russian. But by that time the main direction of Russian expansion had been definitely settled as eastward instead of southward. Perhaps this was to the ultimate advantage of civilisation, even though the decision left the Hellenic peninsula in the grip of the Turk, for it pushed the buffer territory between Europe and Asia far forward into Asia. Should an Asiatic Power, with revived militancy, ever seek again the conquest of Europe, as Asiatic Powers 20 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC have done before this, the war must commence in Manchuria, and not on the plains below the Ural Mountains. The position which Russia has occupied as a buffer state between Asia and Europe has kept her back in the ranks of the army of civilisation. Not only has she had to suffer the first of the savage blows which Asian hordes have from time to time aimed at Europe, but also she has had to endure Asiatic additions to her population, reducing the standard of her race. The instinct against race-mixture which Nature has implanted in man is the great safeguard of the work of evolution to a higher type. The White Race, having developed on certain lines to a position which promises, if it does not fulfil, the evolution of a yet higher type, has an instinctive repugnance to mixing its blood with peoples in other stages of evolution. It is this instinct, this transcendental instinct, which is responsible for the objection to miscegenation in the United States, and for the lynchings by which that objection is impressed upon the negro mind. The same instinct is at the back of the " White Australia " laws, forbidding coloured people any right of entry into Australia. It is not difficult to argue from a point of view of Christian religion and humanity against an instinct which finds its extreme, but yet its logical, expression in the burning of some negro offender at the stake. But all the arguments in the world will not prevail against Nature. Once a type has won a step up it must be RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 21 jealous and " selfish," and even brutal in its scorn of lower types ; or must climb down again. This may not be good ethics, but it is Nature. Russian back- wardness in civilisation to-day is a living proof that the scorn of the coloured man is a necessary condition of the progress of the White Man's civilisation. But the race-mixture which was of evil to Russia has been of benefit to the rest of Europe. To borrow a metaphor from modern preventive medicine, the Russian marches between Europe and Asia have had their power of resistance to Yellow invasion strengthened by the infusion of some Yellow blood. A land of high steppes, very cold in winter, very hot in summer, and of great forests, which were difficult to traverse except where the rivers had cut highways, Russia was never so tempting to the early European civilisations as to lead to her area being definitely occupied and held as a province. Neither Greek nor Roman attempted much colonisation in Russia. By general consent the country was left to be a No-Man's-Land between Asia and Europe. Alexander, whose army penetrated through to India and actually brought back news of the existence of Australia, never marched far north into the interior of Russia. There the mixed tribes of Finns, Aryans, Semites, Mongols held a great gloomy country influenced little by civilisation, but often temporarily submerged by waves of barbarians from the Asiatic steppes. Still Western Europe in time made some little impression on the Russian mass. Byzantine 22 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC culture impressed its mark on the Southern Slavs; Roman culture, after filtering through Germany, reached the Lithuanians of the north. In the twelfth century we hear of Arabian caravans making their way as far as the Baltic in search of amber. But more important to the Russian civilisation was the advent of the Normans in the ninth century. They consolidated White Russia during the ninth to the thirteenth centuries, appeared as warriors before the walls of Byzantium, and learned the Christian faith from the priests of the Eastern com- munion. (Russia has since been faithful always to the Greek Church.) That period was rich in national heroes, such as Rurik, Simeon and Truvor, and definitely set the current of Russian national life towards a place in the European family of nations. By the thirteenth century the White Russians, with their capital established at Moscow, were able to withstand for a while a new Mongol invasion. But they could not prevent Gengis Khan's lieutenants establishing themselves on the lower Volga, and the Grand Prince of Moscow had to be content to become a suzerain of the Grand Khan of Tartary. For three centuries Russia now, amid many troubles, prepared herself to take a place amongst European Powers. She was still more or less subject to the Asiatic. But she was not Asiatic, and her vast area stood between Europe and Asia and allowed the more Western nations to grow up free from interference from any Eastern people, except in RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 23 the case of the great invasion of the Turks coming up from the south-east. How great was the service that Russia unconsciously did to civilisation during those centuries ! If the Tartar had come with the Turk, or had followed him, the White Races and their civilisation might have been swept away. After being the bulwark of Europe for centuries Russia at last found her strength and became the avenger of the White Races. By the sixteenth cen- tury the Russian power had been consolidated under the Muscovite Czars, and a great nation, of which the governing class was altogether European, began to push back the Asiatic. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries the Russian Power grew. The natural direction of expansion was southward. The new nation wanted a place in the sun, and looked longingly towards the Mediterranean. Only the Turk stood in the path, and for the Russian Czars war with the Turk had something of a religious attraction. It was the Cross against the Crescent. It was the champion of the Greek Church winning back the Byzantine Empire to Christian domination. For Russia to march south, driving the infidel from Europe, freeing the Greeks, establishing herself in Constantinople, winning warm- water ports and warm-climate fields, seemed to the Russian mind a national policy which served both God and Mammon. That it served God was no slight thing to the Russian people. They, then as now, cherished a simplicity and a strenuousness of faith which may be 24 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC called "superstitious" or "beautiful and childlike" as the observer may wish, but which is undoubtedly sincere. " There has been only one Christian," wrote Heine. If he had known the Russians he would have qualified the gibe. They have a real faith, and it is an important factor in the making of their national policy which has to be taken into account. How much there was of religious impulse and how much of mere materialistic national ambition in Russia's move southward did not in the least concern other European Powers. Whatever its motive they considered the development dangerous. It threatened to give the Russian an overwhelming power, a paramountcy in Europe, and that could not be tolerated even if it had the most worthy of motives. Above all, Great Britain was alarmed. In the days of Elizabeth Great Britain had been a very good friend to Russia. But Russia was then no possible rival either on land or on the high seas. In the days of Victoria the position had changed. Russia still wore the laurels of her " victories " over Napoleon. She was credited with being the greatest military Power in the world, and credited also with a relent- less and Machiavellian diplomacy that added vastly to the material resources of her armies and fleets. The Crimean War, with its resulting humiliating restrictions on Russian power in the Black Sea, taught Russia that Europe was determined to block her path south and preferred to buttress Turkish misrule than to permit Russian expansion. Baffled RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 25 but still restless, Russia turned east and marched steadily towards the Pacific, with a side glance at the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, which caused Great Britain fresh apprehension as to the fate of India. The progress of the Russian Power in Asia throughout the nineteenth century and its sudden check at the dawn of the twentieth century make one of the most dramatic chapters of the world's history. European rivalry had followed Russia on her march across Siberia, and the British Power in particular was alarmed to see the " Colossus of the North " with a naval base in the Pacific. Alarm was deepened when, after reaching the waters of the Pacific, Russia turned south, again eager for a warm- water port. At the time China seemed to be on the verge of dissolution as a national entity, and it seemed as though Russia were destined to win a great A siatic Empire beside which even India would be a poor prize. In 1885 Great Britain nearly went to war with Russia in the defence of the integrity of Corea. But the decisive check to Russia was to come from another source. The time had arrived for Asia to reassert some of her old warlike might. The island power of Japan, having shaken off the cumbrous and useless armour of medievalism, set herself sturdily in the path of modern progress and aspired to a place among the great nations of the earth. Japan saw clearly that Russia was the immediate 26 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC enemy and prepared for a decisive war, with an uncanny determinedness and a scrupulous attention to every detail. Vast military and naval armaments had to be prepared. The necessary money had to be wrung from a bitterly poor population or borrowed at usurious rates. The political art with which that was done was not the least wonderful part of a great national achievement. Then the weapons of war forged it seemed good to Japanese statesmanship to flesh them on an easy victim. It fell to China's lot to teach the Japanese confidence in their new warlike arts, and to pay in the shape of an indemnity something towards the cost of the great struggle which Japan contemplated. Had Russia had that relentless and Machiavellian diplomacy with which she used to be credited, she would never have permitted the Japanese attack upon China. Constituting herself the champion of China, she would at one stroke have pushed back the growing power of Japan and established a claim to some suzerainty over the Celestial Empire. In carrying out her plans Japan had to take this chance, of Russia coming on top of her when she attacked China. She took the chance and won. Russia would have had to take the chance of a great European upheaval if she had interfered in the Japo- Chinese struggle. She did not take the chance, and allowed her rival to arm at China's expense to meet her. The Chinese war finished, Japan, equipped with RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 27 a full war-chest, a veteran army and navy, was now ready to meet Russia. But she was faced by the difficulty that in meeting Russia she might also have to meet a European coalition, or the almost equally dangerous eventuality of a veto on the war on the part of the United States. Japan was convinced of her ability to fight Russia single-handed. Probably she would, in the last event, have decided to take the risks of any coalition and enter upon the war, since she had to fight Russia or perish as an expanding Power. But she determined in the first instance to attempt to obtain a safeguarding alliance. There are indications that Japan had in the first instance thoughts of the United States, of Germany and of Great Britain, as alternative allies. She thought of the United States because of her great financial strength, her appreciable naval power in the Pacific, and her likely value in keeping Great Britain out of the ring : of Germany because of her military power on the Russian frontier ; of Great Britain because of her overwhelming naval power. Some held that Great Britain was only approached in the second place. Whether that were so or not, the British Power proved favourable. Japan was lucky in the moment of her approach. It had become obvious at that time to British states- manship that the old ideal of " splendid isolation " was no Jonger tenable. The British Empire needed alliances, or at least safeguarding understandings with other nations. But it almost seemed as though 28 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC the knowledge had come too late. Apparently there were no European friendships offering. Japan thus found Great Britain in a somewhat anxious mood, and an alliance was concluded between the Power which had hitherto followed a policy of splendid isolation and the parvenu Power of the Far East. Japan was now all ready, and Russia was doomed to be ousted from her position as a great Power in the Pacific. A great deal of nonsense has been written and accepted as true concerning the war between Japan and Russia. Throughout the course of that war the Japanese took the best of care to put their own view of the case before the world. The "wonderful heroism," "the marvellous strategical and tactical skill," "the perfect medical and transport arrange- ments" of the Japanese forces received something more than their fair share of praise, because of the intelligent and perspicuous industry of the Japanese publicity agencies. The Japanese conducted a fine campaign. Their generals and admirals followed the best models in their dispositions. Both in the move- ments and in the sanitary regulation of the troops, the commanders were much helped by the habit of discipline of a nation inured to yield blind obedience to a god-born ruler. Still there was no inspired genius for war shown by the Japanese. Their move- ments were copied from the books. A well-led White army of much less strength would, I believe, have driven them ultimately from Corea into the sea. Their seeming want of power of original thought and RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC 29 their reliance on routine made their movements slow and flabby. They won by the inferiority of the enemy rather than by a great genius for warfare. The Russians on their side fought under the dispiriting conditions of having a well-trained enemy in front and a revolution behind. The heart of the nation was not with them, and the Russian autocracy was hampered at every turn by the internal disorders of European Russia. It seems probable that the autocracy hoped to solve in part a double problem by the mischievous ingenuity of drafting as many as possible of the discontented at home to the war abroad. That helped things in Russia, but added to the difficulties of the generals in Manchuria. Withal, the Russians put up a good fight. The early en- gagements were but rearguard actions, the Japanese having an enormous superiority of force, and the Russians striving to delay rather than to arrest their advance. It was not until Mukden that the single line of railway to Russia had brought General Kouropatkin a fair equality of force : and he had to contend then with the tradition of retreat which had been perforce established in his army, and with the growing paralysis of his home government confronted by a great revolutionary movement. Even so, Mukden was a defeat and not a rout. It is necessary to keep in mind these facts in order to arrive at a sound conclusion as to the future position of Russia in the Pacific. It is not safe to rule her out of the reckoning altogether. A second 30 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC war, waged by a united Russia against Japan, would probably have a far different result, and would drive Japan off the Asiatic mainland were the ring to be kept clear. For the present, however, Russia is a Power with a great territory washed by the Pacific Ocean, but with no decisive voice in its destinies. CHAPTER III THE RISE OF JAPAN THE misfortune of success has never been better exemplified in the world's history than in the results which have followed from the White Man's attempt to arouse Japan to an appreciation of the blessings of European civilisation. Our fathers and grandfathers of the middle nineteenth century battered at the barred and picturesque doors of the land of the Mikado with a vague idea that there was plunder, trade or some other tangible benefit to be got from dragging the quaint Yellow Recluse out of his retirement. Without a foreboding, every civilised Power that had a fighting ship and the time to spare, took some part in urging Japan to awake and be modern. A great deal of gunpowder was burned before the little Asiatic nation stirred. Then she seemed in a flash to learn the whole lesson of our combative civilisation. Naval strategy ; the forging of trade-marks ; military organisation ; appreciation of the value of cheap labour and of machinery in industry ; aseptic surgery ; resolute and cunning diplomacy all these were suddenly added to the mental equipment of an Asiatic people, and all used in reprisal against Europe. To- 31 32 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC day Japan is the greatest warrior Power in the Pacific, and is also a powerful factor in that war for markets which is not the least important manifesta- tion of race rivalry. As sailors, soldiers, merchants and factory hands, the Japanese are unmistakably awake. With a discipline impossible of achievement by a European race, the Japanese people pursued the methods of eclectic philosophy in their nation-making. They copied the best from the army systems of Germany and France: duplicated the British naval discipline : adopted what they thought most efficient of the industrial machinery of Europe and America, including a scientific tariff. Nothing that seemed likely to be of advantage was neglected. Even the question of religion was seriously considered, and these awakened people were at one time on the point of a simultaneous national adoption of some form of Christianity. But they were convinced on reflection that nothing of Europe's success in this world was due to religion ; and, unconcerned for the moment with anything that was not of this world, decided to forbear from " scrapping " Shintoism and sending it to the rubbish heap where reposed the two-handled sword of the Sumarai. 1 1 Since writing the above, the Japanese Government has revived in a modified form the proposal for a State adoption, in part at least, of the Christian religion. A communication to the Japanese Press on 20th January 1912 from the Minister for Home Affairs stated : " In order to bring about an affiliation of the three religions, it is necessary to connect religion with the State more closely, so as to THE RISE OF JAPAN 33 This miracle of the complete transformation of a race has been accomplished in half a century. Within the memory of some living people the Japanese were content with a secluded life on their hungry islands, where they painted dainty pictures, wove quaint and beautiful fabrics, cultivated children and flowers in a spirit of happy artistry, and pursued give it (religion) added dignity, and thus impress upon the public the necessity of attaching greater importance to religious matters. The culture of national ethics can be perfected by education com- bined with religion. At present moral doctrines are inculcated by education alone, but it is impossible to inculcate firmly fair and upright ideas in the minds of the nation unless the people are brought into touch with the fundamental conception known as God, Buddha, or Heaven, as taught in the religions. It is necessary, therefore, that education and religion should go hand in hand to build up the basis of the national ethics, and it is, therefore, desirable that a scheme should be devised to bring education and religion into closer relations to enable them to promote the national welfare. All religions agree in their fundamental principles, but the present-day conceptions of morals differ according to the time and place and according to the different points of view. It is ever evolving. It may, therefore, be necessary for Shintoism and Buddhism to carry their steps towards Western countries. Christianity ought also to step out of the narrow circle within which it is confined, and endeavour to adapt itself to the national senti- ments and customs, and to conform to the national polity in order to ensure greater achievements. Japan has adopted a progressive policy in politics and economics in order to share in the blessings of Western civilisation. It is desirable to bring Western thought and faith into harmonious relationship with Japanese thought and faith in the spiritual world." This proposal to change in one act the religion of a nation " to ensure greater achievements " will perhaps do something to support the contention, which will be put forward later, that a nation which takes such a curious view of life is not capable of a real and lasting greatness, however wonderful may be its feats of imitation. 3 34 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC war among themselves as a sport, with enthusiasm certainly, but without any excessive cruelty, if con- sideration be given to Asiatic ideas of death and the Asiatic degree of sensitiveness to torture. They were without any ideas of foreign conquest. The world had no respect for Japan then. Specimens of Japanese painting and pottery were admired by a few connoisseurs in little corners of the world (such as Bond Street, London), and that was all. Now, Japan having learned the art of modern warfare, we know also that the Japanese are great artists, great philosophers, great poets. Of a sudden a nation has jumped from being naturally chosen as the most absurd and harmless vehicle for a Gilbert satire to that of being " the honoured ally " of Great Britain, in respect to whose susceptibilities that satire should be suppressed. But our belated respect for the artistry of the Japanese gives little, if any, explanation of the miracle of their sudden transformation. The Chinese are greater artists, greater philosophers, superior in- tellectually and physically. They heard at an even earlier date the same harsh summons from Europe to wake up. But it was neglected, and, whatever the outcome of the revolutionary movement now progressing, the Chinese are not yet a Power to be taken into present consideration as regards the Pacific Ocean or world-politics generally. The most patient search gives no certain guidance as to the causes of Japan's sudden advance to a position THE RISE OF JAPAN 35 amongst the world's great nations. If we could accurately determine those causes it would probably give a valuable clue to the study of the psychology of races. But the effort is in vain. An analogy is often drawn between the Japanese and the British. Except that both were island races, there are few points of resemblance. The British islands, inhabited originally by the Gauls, had their human stock en- riched from time to time by the Romans, the Danes, the Teutons, the Normans. The British type, in part Celtic, in part Roman, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman, was naturally a hard- fighting, stubborn, adventurous race fitted for the work of exploration and colonisation. But the Japanese had, so far as can be ascertained, little advantage from cross-breeding. Probably they were originally a Tartar race. The primitive inhabi- tants of the islands were ancestors of the Hairy Ainus, who still survive in small numbers. Like the aboriginals of Australia, the Ainus were a primitive rather than a degraded type, closely allied to the ancestors of the European races. Probably the Tartar invaders who colonised Japan came by way of Corea. But after their advent there was no new element introduced to give the human race in Japan a fresh stimulus ; and that original Tartar stock, though vigorous and warlike, has never proved else- where any great capacity for organisation. In the sixth century of the Christian Era, Chinese civilisation and the Buddhistic religion came to the 36 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC I Japanese, who at the time had about the same standard of culture as the Red Indians of the American continent when the Mayflower sailed. For some four centuries the Japanese island race < was tributary to China, and during that time there' was evolved a national religion, Shintoism, which probably represented the old Tartar faith modified by Chinese philosophy. In the eighth and sub- sequent centuries, Japan in its national organisation very closely resembled feudal Europe. As in Europe, there was a service tenure for the land ; a system by which organised groups, or KO's, became answerable collectively for the deeds of each member of the group ; and, as in feudal Europe, Church and State made rival claims to supreme power. Indiscriminate fighting between rival feudal lords, ' a constant strife between the Shoguns, representing the priestly power, and the Mikados, representing the civil power, make up the islands' history for century after century. Through it all there is no gleam of light on the evolution of the latent powers which were to come to maturity, as in an hour, during the nineteenth century. Japan appeared to be an average example of a semi-civilised country which would never evolve to a much higher state because of the undisciplined quarrelsomeness of its people. In the sixteenth century Europe first made the < acquaintance of Japan. Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British traders and explorers visited the THE RISE OF JAPAN 37 country. St Francis Xavier established missions there and baptized many in the Christian faith. After two centuries of general toleration, with intervals of welcome and yet other intervals of resolute massacre, in 1741 the last of the Europeans were ordered out of the islands, the Japanese having decided that they wanted neither the religion, the trade, nor the friendship of the White Man. The same prohibitions were applied at the same time to Chinese traders. A resolute policy of exclusiveness was adopted. Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft, flourished a dainty aestheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation, organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial warfare. The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was rude ; 38 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC and it was followed by resolute offers of " friendship," backed by armed threats, from Great Britain, France, \ Russia and Portugal. The Japanese wanted none of them. The feeling of the people was distinctly anti-foreign. They wished to be left to their flowers and their family feuds. But the White Man insisted. In 1864 a combination of Powers forced the Straits f of Shimonoseki. The Japanese were compelled byf these and other outrages to a feeling of national unity. In the face of a foreign danger domestic feuds were forgotten. By 1869 Japan had organised her policy on a basis which has kept internal peace ever since (with the exception of the revolt of the Satsuma in 1884), and she had resolved on fighting out with Russia the issue of supremacy in the Pacific. Within a quarter of a century the new nation had established herself as a Power by the sensational defeat, on land and sea, of China. The Peace of Shimonoseki extended her territory to Formosa and the Pescadores, and filled her treasury with the great war indemnity of 57,000,000. She then won, too, a footing on the Asiatic mainland, but was for the time being cheated of that by the interference of Europe, an interference which was not repeated when, later, having defeated Russia in war and having won an alliance with Great Britain, she finally annexed Corea. From the Peace of Shimonoseki in 1895 the progress of Japan has been marvellous. In 1900 she appeared as one of the civilised Powers which invaded THE RISE OF JAPAN 39 China with a view to impress upon that Empire the duty a semi-civilised Power owed to the world of j maintaining internal order. In 1902 she entered into a defensive and offensive alliance with Great Britain, by which she was guaranteed a ring clear from interference on the part of a European combina- tion in the struggle with Russia which she contem- plated. The treaty was a triumph of diplomatic wisdom. Appearing to get little, Japan in real truth < got all that her circumstances required. A treaty! binding Great Britain to come to her aid in any war would have been hopeless to ask for, and not very useful when obtained, for the Japanese attack on Russia might then have been the signal for a general European war in which possibly a European com- bination would have crippled Great Britain and then turned its united attention to the destruction of Japan's nascent power. A treaty which kept the ring clear for a single-handed struggle with Russia was better than that risk. In return Japan gave nothing in effect except a pledge to make war on her own immediate enemy, Russia, for the assistance of Great Britain if necessity arose. The conditions created by the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 developed naturally to the Battle of Mukden, the culminating point of a campaign in which for the first time for many years the Yellow Race vanquished the White Race in war. That Battle of Mukden not only established Japan's position in the world. It made the warlike awakening of 40 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC China inevitable, and restored to the daylight again the long-hidden yet always existing arrogance of Asia. Asia has ever nurtured an insolence beside which any White Race pride is insignificant. That fact is made patent during recurring epochs of history. The Persian Darius sent to the Greeks for earth and water, symbols to acknowledge that "Persia ruled the land and the oceans." The Huns later looked upon the White Men whom they con- quered as something lower than animals. The Turks, another great Asiatic race to war against Europe, could compare the White Man only to that unclean beast, the dog. The first European ambassadors who went to China were forced to crawl with abject humility to the feet of the Chinese dignitaries. In his secret heart of which the European mind knows so little the Asiatic, whether he be Japanese, Chinese, or Indian, holds a deep disdain for the White. The contempt we feel for them is returned more than one hundredfold. Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore an event of history more important than any since the fall of Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream ; more than half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most serious THE RISE OF JAPAN 41 foe to Christian Europe, was sealed. From 1711 to 1905, whatever questions of supremacy arose among the different European Powers, there was never any doubt as to the superiority of the European race over all coloured races. The White Man moved from one easy conquest to another. In Asia, India, China, Persia and Japan were in turn humbled. Africa was made the slave-farm of the White Race. Now in the twentieth century at Mukden thej White Race supremacy was again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic ; and which has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gain- ing the mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among rival White nations could be agreed upon. 42 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure after the war which called for an extreme degree of self- abnegation from her people. If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy ; so established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank movement on China ; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the Pacific with over- whelming force on the completion of the Panama Canal an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible responsibility of going THE RISE OF JAPAN 43 to war with America on behalf of Japan. The per- manence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism, patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "stay- ing power " of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East, or have done business with Japan, pro- fess a doubt that an enduring greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a " flash in the pan " the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that type of doomed infant which quickly flowers 44 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC and quickly fades in the European slums and which is known as " The Mongol " to medical science because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity of brain : its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an early end from an ineradicable internal weak- ness which is, in some strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness. Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressive- ness will last or not, the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural capital." There is practically no store of precious metals ; a poor supply of the useful minerals ; small area of good land ; and the local fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what has been won is quite in- sufficient to weigh in the scale against the " natural capital " of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific. For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese THE RISE OF JAPAN 45 policy has hoped that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk, not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the population. But there are now no islands or territories without a protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and another Latin- American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific. If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and trading power ? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii, the same conclusion is come 46 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC to by European fellow-residents, that the Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised. The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report in a Tokio paper stated : " At a secret session of the Budget Commission on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the super -Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class, which must be completed by 1920, construction being be- gun in 1913. The cost is estimated at 35,000,000." And the paper (A sold Shimbun] went on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted. That is only one of very many indica- tions of Japanese national feeling. She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific. CHAPTER IV CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA CHINA is potentially the greatest Power on the western littoral of the Pacific. Her enormous territory has vast agricultural and mineral resources. Great rivers give easy access to some of the best of her lands. A huge population has gifts of patient labour and craftsmanship that make the Chinaman a feared competitor by every White worker in the world. In courage he is not inferior to the Japanese, as General Gordon found. In intelligence, in fidelity and in that common sense which teaches "honesty to be the best policy," the Chinaman is far superior to the Japanese. The Chinaman has been outstripped up to the present by the Japanese in the acquirement of the arts of Western civilisation, not because of his inferior mind, but because of his deeper disdain. He has stood aside from the race for world supremacy on modern lines, not as one who is too exhausted for effort, but as one who is too experienced to try. China has in the past experimented with many of the vaunted ideas and methods of the new civil- isation, from gunpowder to a peerage chosen by 47 48 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC competitive examination, and long ago came to the conclusion that all was vanity and vexation of spirit. The Chinaman is not humble ; not content to take an inferior place in the world. He has all the arrogance of Asia. The name of " Heavenly Kingdom " given to the land by its inhabitants, the grandiose titles assumed by its rulers, the degrading ceremonies which used to be exacted from foreigners visiting China as confessions of their inferiority to the Celestial race, show an extravagant pride of birth. In the thirteenth century, when Confucian China, alike with Christian Europe, had to fear the growing power of the fanatical Mohammedans, a treaty of alliance was suggested between France and China: and the negotiations were broken off because of the claim of China that France should submit to her as a vassal, by way of preliminary. The Chinaman's idea of his own importance has not abated since then. His attitude towards the " foreign devils " is still one of utter contempt. But at present that contempt has not the backing of naval and military strength, and so in practice counts for nothing. China cherishes the oldest of living civilisations. Her legendary history dates back to 2404 B.C., her actual history to 875 B.C., when a high state of mental culture had been reached, and a very advanced material civilisation also ; though some caution is necessary in accepting the statements that at that time China made use of gunpowder, of the mariner's CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 49 compass, and of printing type. But certainly weaving, pottery, metal-working, and pictorial art flourished. The noble height to which philosophy had reached centuries before the Christian Era is shown by the records of Confucianism and Taoism. Political science had been also cultivated, and there were then Chinese Socialists to claim that "everyone should sow and reap his own harvest." There seem to have been at least two great parent races of the present population of the Chinese Empire a race dwelling in the valleys and turning its thoughts to peace and the arts, and a race dwelling on the Steppes and seeking joy in war. It was the Tartar and Mongol tribes of the Steppes which sent wave after wave of attack westward towards Europe, under chiefs the greatest of whom was Gengis Khan. But it was the race of the valleys, the typical Chinese, stolid, patient, laborious, who established ultimate supremacy in the nation, gradually absorbing the more unruly elements and producing modern China with its contempt for military glory. But the Mongols by their wars left a deep impression on the Middle Ages, founding kingdoms which were tribu- tary to China, in Persia, Turkestan and as far west as the Russian Volga. The earliest record of European relations with China was in the seventh century, when the Emperor Theodosius sent an embassy to the Chinese Emperor. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the Court of the Grand Khan at Pekin, and for a while 4 50 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC fairly constant communication between Europe and China seems to have been maintained, the route followed being by caravan across Asia. Christian missionaries settled in China, and in 1248 there is a record of the Pope and the Grand Khan exchanging greetings. When towards the end of the fourteenth century the Ming dynasty supplanted the Mongol dynasty, communication with Europe was broken off for more than a century. But in 1581 Jesuit missionaries again entered China, and the Manchu dynasty of the seventeenth century at first protected the Christian faith and seemed somewhat to favour Western ideas. But in the next century the Christian missions were persecuted and almost extirpated, to be revived in 1846. Since that date "the mailed fist" of Europe has exacted from the Chinese a forced tolerance of European trade and missions. But Chinese prejudice against foreign intrusion was given no reason for abatement by the conduct of the European Powers, as shown, for example, in the Opium War of 1840. That prejudice, smouldering for long, broke out in the savage fanaticism of the Boxer outbreak of 1900, which led to a joint punitive expedition by the European Powers, in conjunction with Japan. China had the mortification then of being scourged not only by the " white devils " but also by an upstart Yellow Man, who was her near and her despised neighbour. All China that knew of the expedition to Pekin of 1900 and understood its CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 51 significance, seems to have resolved then on some change of national policy involving the acceptance of European methods, in warfare at least. Responding to the stimulus of Japan's flaunting of her success in acquiring the ways of the European, China began to i consider whether there was not after all something useful to be learned from the Western barbarians. The older Asiatic country has a deep contempt for the younger : but proof of Japan's superior position in the world's estimation had become too convincing to be disregarded. China saw Japan treated with respect, herself with contumely. She found herself humiliated in war and in diplomacy by the upstart relative. The reason was plain, the conclusion equally plain. China began to arm and lay the foundations of a modern naval and military system. The national spirit began to show, too, in industry. Chinese capital claimed its right and its duty to develop the resources of China. Early in the twentieth century " modern ideas " had so far established themselves in China that Grand Councillor Chang Chih-tung was able, without the step being equivalent to suicide, to memorialise the Throne with these suggestions for reform : 1. That the Government supply funds for free education. 2. That the Army and Navy be reorganised with- out delay. 3. That able and competent officials be secured for Government services. 52 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC 4. That Princes of the blood be sent abroad to study. 5. That arsenals for manufacturing arms, ammuni- tion, and other weapons of war, and docks and shipbuilding yards for constructing warships, be established without delay. 6. That only Chinese capital be invested in rail- way and mining enterprises. 7. That a date be given for the granting of a Constitution. Chang Chih-tung may be taken as the repre- sentative of the new school of Chinese thought. His book Chuen Hsueh Pien (China's Only Hope) is the Bible of the moderate reformers. He states in that book : " In order to render China powerful, and at the same time preserve our own institutions, it is absolutely necessary that we should utilise Western knowledge. But unless Chinese learning is made the basis of education, and a Chinese direction given to thought, the strong will become anarchists, and the weak slaves. Thus the latter end will be worse than the former. . . . Travel abroad for one year is more profitable than study at home for five years. It has been well said that seeing is a hundred times better than hearing. One year's study in a foreign institution is better than three years in a Chinese. Mencius remarks that a man can learn foreign things best abroad ; but much more benefit can be derived from travel by older and experienced men than by CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 53 the young, and high mandarins can learn more than petty officials. . . . Cannot China follow the viam mediam and learn a lesson from Japan ? As the case stands to-day, study by travel can be better done in that country than in Europe, for the following reasons. ... If it were deemed advisable, some students could afterwards be sent to Europe for a fuller course." After the Russian-Japanese War Chinese students went to Japan in thousands, and these students laid the foundation of the Republican school of reformers which is the greatest of the forces striving for mastery in China to-day. The flow of students to Japan was soon checked by the then Chinese Government, for the reason that Republican sentiments seemed to be absorbed in the atmosphere of Japan, despite the absolutism of the Government there. In the United States and in Europe the Chinese scholar was able, however, to absorb Western knowledge without acquiring Republican opinions ! There is some suggestion of a grim jest on the part of the Chinese in holding to this view. It recalls Boc- caccio's story of the Christian who despaired of the conversion of his Jewish friend when he knew that he contemplated a visit to Rome. The Chinese seemed to argue that a safe precaution against acquiring Republican views is to live in a Republican country. Chinese confidence in the educational advantages offered by the United States has been justified by results. American-educated Chinese are prominent 54 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC in every phase of the Reform movement in China, except Republican agitation. The first Reform Foreign Minister in China, the first great native Chinese railway builder, the first Chinese women doctors, the greatest native Chinese banker, are examples of American training. It would be outside the scope of this work to attempt to deal in any way exhaustively with the present position in China. What the ultimate outcome will be, it is impossible to forecast. At present a Republic is in process of formation, after the baby Emperor through the Dowager Empress had promulgated an edict stating: " We, the Emperor, have respectfully received the following Edict from her Majesty the Dowager : " In consequence of the uprising of the Republican Army, to which the people in the Provinces have responded, the Empire seethed liked a boiling cauldron, and the people were plunged in misery. Yuan Shih-kai, therefore, commanded the despatch of Commissioners to confer with the Republicans with a view to a National Assembly deciding the form of government. Months elapsed without any settlement being reached. It is now evident that the majority of the people favour a Republic, and, from the preference of the people's hearts, the will of Heaven is discernible. How could we oppose the desires of millions for the glory of one family? Therefore, the Dowager Empress and the Emperor hereby vest the sovereignty in the people. Let CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 55 Yuan Shih-kai organise with full powers a provisional Republican Government, and let him confer with the Republicans on the methods of establishing a union which shall assure the peace of the Empire, and of forming a great Republic, uniting Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Mohammedans, and Tibetans." But all men whom I have met who have had chances of studying Chinese conditions at first hand, agree that the Chinese national character is not favour- able to the permanent acceptance of Republican ideas. If there is one thing which seems fixed in the Chinese character it is ancestor- worship, and that is essen- tially incompatible with Republicanism. 1 But what 1 A very clear statement as to the position in China was that given in London during January of 1912 by Mr Kwei Chih, a secretary of the Chinese Legation. "None of the dynasties in China," he said, "has ever maintained a tyrannical regime for any length of time, least of all the Manchu dynasty, the policy of which has consisted rather of a mixture of paternalism and obscurantism than of hard repression of the people. . . . The present unanimous desire of the Chinese to remove the Manchu dynasty arises solely from the fact that the Chinese have fully awakened to the realisation that only a policy of thorough- going Westernisation can save China from disruption and partition. The removal of the Manchu dynasty is of no greater national moment to China than would be the fall of a Cabinet to any European country. Personal animus enters, indeed, so little into the determination of the new Chinese regime that the question of setting apart lands for the deposed dynasty, and even of granting it ex-territorial privileges, may eventually be accepted in the way of a solution. In regard to the adoption of Republican ideas, it may be said that the Chinese statesman does not understand the meaning of the Republican principle, and if a new regime should declare itself Republican, its Republicanism will be of a much more strongly democratic type than any known to Europe. It will even 56 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC seems absolutely certain is that a new China is coming to birth. Slowly the great mass is being leavened with a new spirit. Now a new China, armed with modern weapons, would be a terrible engine of war. A new China organised to take the field in modern industry would be a formidable rival in neutral markets to any exist- ing nation. The power of such a new China put at the disposal of Japan could at least secure all Asia for the Asiatics and hold the dominant position in the Northern Pacific. Possibly it could establish a world supremacy, unless such a Yellow union forced White Races to disregard smaller issues and unite against a common foe. Fortunately a Chinese -Japanese alliance is not at present in the least likely. The Chinese hatred of the Japanese is of long standing and resolute, though it is sometimes dissembled. The Japanese have an ill-concealed contempt for the Chinese. Conflict is more likely than alliance be- tween the two kindred races. Further, the Chinese will probably move far more slowly on any path of aggression than did the Japanese, for they are intensely pacific. For many be more popular in its constitution than the American, and will far more fully seek the development of the common weal than most bureaucratic systems bearing the name. The suggested application of Christian principles to the new regime may be regarded as wholly impossible. Confucianism, by which China stands or falls, is a secular philosophy, the only semblance of a spiritual or religious tenet in which is the principle of ancestor-worship, and though a theocratic idea is admitted in the creation of the universe, the question of a life hereafter is wholly excluded from its teachings." CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 57 generations they have been taught to regard the soldier as contemptible, the recluse scholar as ad- mirable. Ideas of overseas Empire on their part are tempered by the fanatic wish of every Chinaman that his bones should rest in his native land. It will only be in response to enormous pressure that China will undertake a policy of adventure. That pressure is now being engendered from with- in and without. From without it is being engendered 1 by insolent robberies of territory and other outrages ! on the part of foreign Powers. More particularly of late has the modern arrogance of Japan impressed upon the old-fashioned arrogance of China the fact that the grave scholar, skilled in all the lore of Confucius, is a worthless atom beside a drilled coolie who can shoot straight. From within the pressure is : being engendered by the great growth of population.! For some time past infanticide has been common in China as a Malthusian check. Now European missionaries seek to discourage that. European medicine further sets itself to teach the Yellow Man to cope with plague, smallpox, and cholera, while European engineering abates the terrors of flood and of crop failure. Machiavelli would have found prompting for some grim aphorism in this curious eagerness of Europe to teach the teeming millions of Asia to rid themselves of checks on their greater growth, and thus to in- crease the pressure of the Asiatic surplus seeking an outlet at the expense of Europe. It is in respect to 58 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC the urgent demand for room for an overcrowding population that there exists alike to China and Japan the strongest stimulus to warlike action in the Pacific. China in particular wants colonies, even if they be only such colonies as provide opportunities for her coolies to amass enough wealth to return in old age to China. From the fertile basin of China there have been overflow waves of humanity ever since there has been any record of history. Before the era of White settlement in the Pacific the Chinese popu- lation had pushed down the coast of Asia and pene- trated through a great part of the Malay Archipelago, an expansion not without its difficulties, for the fierce Malay objected to the patient Chinaman and often the Chinaman remained to fertilise but not to colonise the alien soil. By some Providential chance neither the Chinaman nor the Japanese ever reached to Australia in the early days of the Pacific, though there are records of Japanese fishermen getting as far as the Hawaiian Group, a much more hazardous journey. If the Asiatics had reached Australia the great island would doubtless have become the southern province of Asia, for its native popula- tion could have offered no resistance to the feeblest invader. In the past, however, the great natural checks kept the Asiatic populations within some limits. Internal wars, famines, pestilences, infanticide all claimed their toll. Nature exercised on man the checks which exist throughout the whole animal kingdom, CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 59 and which in some regions of biology are so stern that it is said that only one adult survives of 5,000,000 spawn of a kind of oyster. Now European influence is steadily directed in Asia to removing all obstacles to the growth of population. When the Asiatics wish to fight among themselves Europe is inclined to interfere (as at the time of the Boxer outbreak in China), on the ground that a state of disorder cannot be tolerated. In India internecine warfare is strictly prohibited by the paramount Power. In Japan all local feuds have been healed by pressure from Europe and America, and the fighting power of the people concentrated for external warfare. Not alone by checking internal warfare does Europe insist on encouraging the growth of the Asiatic myriads. European science suggests rail- ways, which make famine less terrible ; flood preven- tion works which save millions of lives. European moralists make war on such customs as the suicide of young widows and the exposure for death of female children. But, far more efficacious than all, European scientists come forward to teach to the Asiatics aseptic surgery, inoculation, and the rest of the wisdom of preventive and curative medicine. Sometimes Nature is stronger than science. The Plague, for instance, still claims its millions. But even the Plague diminishes before modern medical science. In his Health and Empire (1911), Dr Francis 60 PROBLEiMS OF THE PACIFIC Fremantle tells of the campaign against plague in India. He writes : " The death-rate from plague in 1904 in the Lahore and Amritsar districts in which I worked was 25 per 1000. Over 1,000,000 Indians died of plague in 1904, over 1,000,000 in 1905 ; in 1906, 332,000, and it was thought the end was in sight. But 640,000 died in the first four months of 1907 ; in 1908, 321,000 died; in 1909 only 175,000, but in 1910 again very nearly 500,000, and this year more than ever. The United Provinces had barely been reached by the epidemic in 1904 ; now with a popu- lation equal to that of the United Kingdom, they have been losing 20,000 every week ; and the Punjab 34,000 in one week, 39,000, 47,000, 54,000, 60,000 and so on over 430,000 in the first four months of this year in a population of 25,000,000. Imagine Great Britain and Ireland losing the same proportion over 1,000,000 from plague in half a year. And India as a whole has in fifteen years lost over 7,000,000 from plague. Why wonder at her unrest ? " What, then, can the Government do? Extermina- tion of rats is impossible; disinfection on a large scale is impracticable ; evacuation of villages cannot be done voluntarily on any universal scale; the Government will not apply compulsion, and such evacuation is quite useless without a rigid cordon of police or military that will prevent communication between one infected village and others not yet infected. A cordon, it has been proved over and CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 61 over again, cannot be maintained ; the native who wishes to pass it has only to present some official with a cautious rupee. Extermination of rats in an Asiatic country has often failed ; but here is without a shadow of doubt the key to the problem. The methods formerly adopted had been to give a capitation grant for every rat brought to the appointed place, and before long it was found, for instance in Bombay, that an extensive trade had grown up in the breeding of rats, whereby, at a few annas apiece from the Government, many families were able to sustain a comfortable existence. . . . But since sentence on the rat-flea has been pro- nounced for the murder of 7,000,000 persons and over, the best method for his extermination will not be far off. "It is often debated whether even half-measures are worth being continued. Professor W. J. Simpson, in his exhaustive monograph on the plague, and in 1907 in his Croonian Lectures ', has shown how in history epidemics of plague have come and gone in different countries with long intervals between them, often of one hundred and thirty to one hundred and fifty years. In the eighteenth century, for instance, India seems to have been almost free of the plague, but early in the seventeenth century it suffered severely. The present epidemic is assuming, as far as we can trust previous records, unprecedented propor- tions ; probably after a few years it will die out again. "An occasional cynic may argue that, since we 62 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC have saved so many thousands of lives annually from famine and wars, it may be just as well to let the plague take their place. To such a pessimistic and inhuman conclusion it is impossible for one moment to submit. It may be that for economic reasons some parts of the Indian Empire would be happier if their population were less dense ; but it does not follow that we should allow Death to stalk uninterrupted, unopposed, and apparently without limit, throughout the country. Economics apart, we may yet be absolutely convinced, whether as doctors or as statesmen, that it is our mission, our duty, to protect the populations included under British rule to the best of our ability against every scourge as it may arise; and therefore it is urgent that such measures as we have be pushed forward with the utmost vigour." That tells (in a more convincing way, because of the impatience of the doctor, accustomed to European conditions, at the slow result of work in India) how resolute is the White Man's campaign against the Yellow Man's death-rate in one part of Asia. Such a campaign in time must succeed in destroying the disease against which it is directed and thus adding further to the fecundity of Asia. Nor is the fight against diseases confined to those parts of Asia under direct White rule. The cult of White medicine spreads everywhere, carried by Japanese as well as by European doctors and mission- aries. Its effects already show in the enormous in- CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 63 crease of Asiatic population, proved wherever definite figures are available. That growth adds year by year to the danger that the Yellow Man will overrun the Pacific and force the White Man to a second place in the ocean's affairs, perhaps not even leaving him that. An older and sterner school of thought would have condemned as fatuous the White Races' humanitarian nurture of the Yellow Races. But the gentler thought of to-day will probably agree with Dr Fremantle that the White Man cannot " allow Death to stalk uninterrupted, unopposed" even through the territory of our racial rivals. But we must give serious thought to the position which is thus created, especially in view of the "levelling" racial tendency of modern weapons of warfare. China has a population to-day, according to Chinese estimates, of 433,000,000 ; according to an American diplomatist's conclusions, of not much more than half that total. But it is, without a doubt, growing as it never grew before ; and modern reform ideas will continue to make it grow and render the menace of its overflow more imminent. At present the trend of thought in China is pacific. But it is not possible to be sure that there will not be a change in that regard with the ferment of new ideas. The discussion to-day of a Republic in China, of womanhood suffrage in China, of democratic social- ism in China, suggests that the vast Empire, which has been for so long the example of conservative 64 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC immobility most favoured by rhetoricians anxious to illustrate a political argument, may plunge into unexpected adventures. China has in the past provided great invaders of the world's peace. She may in the near future turn again to the thoughts of military adventure. The chance of this would be increased if in the settlement of her constitutional troubles a long resort to arms were necessary. Then the victorious army, whether monarchical or Republican, might aspire to win for a new China recognition abroad. It is a fortunate fact that supposing a revival of militancy in China, a revival which is possible but not probable, the first brunt of the trouble would probably fall upon .Japan. At the present moment Japan is the most serious offender against China's national pride. As the conqueror of Corea and the occupier of Manchuria, she trespasses most of all foreign Powers on the territories and the rights of China. After Japan, Russia would have to expect a demand for a reckoning ; Great Britain would come third and might come into collision with an aggres- sive China, either because of the existence of such settlements as Hong Kong or because of the Thibetan boundary. A China in search of enemies, however, would find no lack of good pretexts for quarrelling. There are, for instance, the offensive and humiliating restrictions on Chinese immigration of the United States, of Canada, New Zealand and Australia. I find it necessary, however, to conclude that so CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA 65 far as the near future is concerned, China will not take a great warrior part in the determining of Pacific issues. She may be able to enforce a more wholesome respect for her territorial integrity : she may push away some intruders : she may even insist on a less injurious and contemptuous attitude towards her nationals abroad. But she will not, I think, seek greatness by a policy of aggression. There is no analogy between her conditions and those of Japan at the time of the Japanese acceptance of European arts and crafts. Japan at the time was a bitterly quarrelsome country: she turned from civil to foreign war. China has been essentially pacific for some centuries. Japan was faced at the outset of her national career with the fact that she had to expand her territory or else she could not hope to exist as a great Power. China has within her own borders all that is necessary for national greatness. If at a later date the Chinese, either from a too- thorough study of the lore of European civilisation, or from the pressure of a population deprived of all Malthusian checks and thus finding an outlet absol- utely necessary, should decide to put armies and navies to work for the obtaining of new territory, the peril will be great to the White Man. Such a Chinese movement could secure Asia for the Asiatics, and might not stop at that point. But that danger is not of +his decade, though it may have to be faced later by the White Power which wins the supremacy of the Pacific. 5 CHAPTER V THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER FOLLOWING the map of the North- Western Pacific littoral, the eye encounters, on leaving the coast of China, the Philippine Islands, proof of the ambition of the United States to hold a place in the Pacific. It is a common fallacy to ascribe to the United States a Quakerish temperament in foreign affairs. Certain catch-words of American local politics have been given a fictitious value, both at home and abroad. "Republican Simplicity," "The Rights of Man," " European Tyranny," " Imperial Aggression," " The Vortex of Militarism " from these and similar texts some United State publicists are wont to preach of the tyranny of European kings and emperors ; of their greed to swallow up weak neighbours ; and of the evils of the military and naval systems maintained to gratify such greed. By much grandiose assertion, or by that quiet implication which is more complete proof of a con- vinced mind than the most grandiose of assertion, the American nation has been pictured in happy contrast to others, pursuing a simple and peaceful life; with no desire for more territory; no wish to 66 THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 67 interfere with the affairs of others ; in the world, but not of the world. Astonishment that such professions should carry any weight at all in the face of the great mass of facts showing that the American national temper is exactly the reverse of Quakerish, is modified in the political student by the fact that it is the rule for nations as well as individuals to be judged in the popular estimation by phrases rather than by facts. Ignoring the phrases of politicians and considering only the facts, it will be found that the American people have Imperial ambitions worthy of their ancestry and inseparable from the responsibility towards civilisation which their national greatness involves. It was in the middle of the eighteenth century that the United States began national housekeeping within a small territory on the seaboard of the Atlantic. By the nineteenth century that area had extended over a section of the continent of America as large almost as Europe. By the twentieth century this Power, still represented as incurably " peaceful and stay-at-home " by its leaders, was established in the Caribbean Sea, on the Isthmus of Panama, in the North and South Pacific, along the coast of Asia, and had set up firmly the principle that whatever affair of the world demanded inter- national attention, from a loan to China, to the fate of an Atlantic port of Morocco, the United States had "interests" which must be considered, and 68 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC advice which must be regarded. The only circum- stance that genuinely suggests a Quaker spirit in United States foreign diplomacy is her quaint direct- ! ness of language. More effete peoples may wrap every stage of a negotiation up to an ultimatum in honeyed phrases of respect. America "tutoyers" all courts and is mercilessly blunt in claim and warning. It would be very strange if the United States were otherwise than Imperial in spirit. Nations, like individuals, are affected by biological laws ; a young, strong nation is as naturally aggressive and ambitious as a young, strong boy. Contentment with things as they are, a disposition to make anxious sacrifices to the gods who grant peace, are the signs of old age. If a boy is quite good his parents have a reasonable right to suspect some constitutional weakness. A new nation which really resembled what a great many of the American people think the United States to be, would show as a morbid anomaly. No ; the course of the world's future history will never be correctly forecasted except on the assumption that the United States is an aggressively Imperial nation, having an influence at least equal to that of any European Power in the settlement of international issues; and determined to use that influence and to extend its scope year by year. In the Problem of the Pacific particularly, the United States must be counted, not merely as a great factor but the greatest factor. THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 69 If the American citizen of to-day is considered as though he were a British citizen of some generations back, with a healthy young appetite for conquest still uncloyed, some idea near to the truth will have been reached. But since the deference exacted by public opinion nowadays compels some degree of pretence and does not permit us to parade our souls naked, it is improbable that the United States citizen of this century will adopt the frank freebooting attitude of the Elizabethan Englishman when he was laying the foundations of his Empire by methods in- spired somewhat by piracy as w r ell as by patriotism. The American will have to make some concession to the times and seek always a moral sanction for the extension of his boundaries. Such a search, however, is rarely made in vain when it is backed by a resolved purpose. It was sufficient for Francis Drake to know that a settlement was Spanish and rich. The attack followed. The United States needs to know that a possession is foreign, is desirable, and is grossly ill- governed before she will move to a remonstrance in the sacred name of Liberty. Since good government is an ideal which seldom comes at all close to realisa- tion, and the reputation of no form of administration can survive the ordeal of resolute foreign criticism, the practical difference is slight. The American Empire will grow with the benediction always of a high moral purpose ; but it will grow. It is interesting to recall the fact that at its very birth the United States was invested by a writer of 70 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC prophetic insight with the purple of Empire. Said the London Gazette of 1765 : " Little doubt can be entertained that America will in time be the greatest and most prosperous Empire that perhaps the world has ever seen." But the early founders of the new nation, then as now, deceived themselves and others with the view that a pacific little Republic, not a mighty Empire, was their aim. The Imperial instinct showed, however, in the fact that the baby nation had in its youngest days set up a formidable navy. It was ostensibly " for the local defence of its shores," but naval power and overseas Empire are inseparably linked. The austere Republic began to grow in territory and influence at a rate putting to shame the early feats of the Roman power. By 1$93 the United States had made it clear that she would not allow her independence to be fettered in the slightest degree by any claims of gratitude from France : and her Declaration of Neutrality in the European War then raging was a clear statement of claim to be considered as a Power. The war with the Barbary States in 1802 to suppress piracy was a claim to police rights on the high seas, police rights which custom gives only to a paramount sea Power. By the next year Spain and France had been more or less politely relieved of all responsibilities in North America, and the United States stretched from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to the Gulf of Mexico. It is upon the early eloquence of her founders as to THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 71 the duty of the United States to confine her attention strictly to America, that the common misconception of America's place in foreign policy has been built up. That talk, however, was in the first instance dictated^ largely by prudence. Alexander Hamilton, who controlled the foreign policy of the infant Republic at the outset, was particularly anxious that she should find her feet before attempting any deeds of enter- prise. In particular, he was anxious that the United States should not, through considerations of sentiment, be drawn into the position of a mere appanage of France. He set the foundations of what was known afterwards as the " Monroe doctrine," with the one thought that, at the time, a policy of non-interference with European affairs was a necessary condition of free growth for the young nation. The same idea governed Washington's farewell address in 1796 with its warning against "foreign entanglements." Afterwards the "Monroe doctrine" deriving its name from a message by President Monroe in 1823 was given the meaning that the United States would not tolerate any interference with the affairs of the American continent by Europe. Finally the " Monroe doctrine," which had begun with an affirma- tion of America's non-participation in European affairs, and had developed into a declaration against European interference with American affairs, took its present form, which is, in effect, that over all America the United States has a paramount interest which must not be questioned, and that as regards the rest of the 72 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC world she claims an equal voice with other Powers. Yet, though that is the actual position, there is still an idea in some minds that the Monroe doctrine is an instrument of humbleness by which the United States claims the immunity of America from foreign interference and guarantees foreign countries from American interference. It will be of value to recall, in illustration of the rapid growth of an aggressive national pride in the United States, the circumstances which led up to Mr. President Monroe's formal message in 1823. The dawn of the nineteenth century found the young American nation, after about a quarter of a century's existence, fairly on her feet; able to vindicate her rights abroad by a war against the Barbary pirates : given by the cession of Louisiana from France, a magnificent accession of territory. The Empire of Spain was crumbling to pieces, and between 1803 and 1825 the Latin- American Republics in South and Central America were being established on the ruins of that Empire. Spain, her attention engaged in European wars, was able to do little or nothing to assert herself against the rebellious colonies. But in 1815, Napoleon having been vanquished, the Holy Alliance in Europe attempted to reassert the old power of the European monarchies. The terror of Napoleon's army had forced the kings of the earth into a union which forgot national differences and was anxious only to preserve the Divine Right of Kings. The formation of this Holy Alliance was THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 73 viewed with suspicion and dislike in the United States, and when in 1823 the Alliance raised the question of joint action by European monarchies to restore Spanish rule in South America, the United States responded with Monroe's famous message forbidding any European interference on the continent of America. Such European colonies as already existed would be tolerated, and that was all. The message stated : "The American continents by the free and independent conditions which they have assumed are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonisation by any European Power. " We could not view any interposition for purpose of oppressing them or controlling in any other manner their destiny by any European Power in any other way than as the manifestation of an unfriendly disposition towards the United States." That " Monroe doctrine " was destined to be extended greatly in scope. In 1845 Mr. President Polk declared that no future European colony should be planted on any part of the North American continent, and laid it down as the duty of the United States "to annex American territory lest it be annexed by European countries." True to that faith, he was responsible for the annexation of Texas, Oregon and California. The United States claim to overlordship of North America was still more remarkably extended in 1867, when a protest was entered against the Federation of the Canadian Provinces. The protest was not insisted upon then, 74 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC though in 1870 Mr. President Grant revived the spirit of the protest with his forecast of "the end of European political connection with this continent." The Venezuela controversy between Great Britain and the United States in 1895 was responsible for another extension of the Monroe doctrine. It was then claimed that " foreign colonies ought to cease in this hemisphere." Insistence on that would, however, have led to a war in which Great Britain probably would have had the assistance of other European Powers affected ; and the Monroe doctrine receded a little. Exactly how this chief article of the United States foreign policy stands to-day one cannot say. Certainly the Monroe doctrine does not mean, as it was once supposed to mean, that the United States in return for foreign abstention from inter- ference in American affairs pledges herself to keep apart from all extra-American affairs. In world politics she claims and exercises the privileges to which her vast resources and her high state of civilisation are the warrants. In regard to American affairs the Monroe doctrine clearly forbids any further European colonisation in North or South America, and constitutes the United States as the Suzerain Power of all the Latin- American Republics (whether they are willing or not). What else it will be found to mean will depend on the circumstances of the moment and the feelings of the newspaper proprietors who exercise so great an influence on THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 75 the American man-in-the-street, the governing factor in shaping his country's foreign policy. In European countries, however democratic, the man-in-the-street has rarely any immediate authority over Foreign Affairs. In Great Britain, for example, the questions of the relations of the Government with other countries are not canvassed before the voters. The close oligarchy of the Cabinet (acting often with the Opposition Front Bench) comes to decisions of peace and war, of treaty and entente , and, after decision, allows Parliament and the electorate to acquiesce. But in the United States foreign policy is actually dictated by the voters ; and that means, in effect, by the newspapers. On occasion the Monroe doctrine has already been interpreted into a notice to quit to all European Powers holding settlements on the American continent. It may in the near future revive that claim to paramount and exclusive authority, and it may cover a declaration of direct suzerainty over Mexico, and over the smaller re- publics intervening between the United States border and the Panama Canal. In most Latin- American republics disorder is the rule rather than the exception ; and it may become at any moment the honest opinion of the man-in-the-street of the United States that the Panama Canal is too important to civilisation to be left to the chances of interference from less stable governments than his own. These conclusions are inevitable to anyone making any study of American history and the American 76 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC character. They are not hostile criticisms. They are rather appreciations. A great nation with a belief in its destiny must be " Imperialist " in spirit, because it has a natural desire to spread the blessings of its rule. The people of the United States believe as strongly in themselves as did the ancient Hebrews, and all must have a genuine respect for that fierce spirit of elect nationality which made the Hebrews found a great nation on a goat-patch. In Elizabethan England the same spirit flourished and was respon- sible for the founding of the British Empire. (It survives still in the British Isles, though somewhat spasmodically.) There is no ground at all either for wonder or for complaint in the fact that Imperialism has been born to vigorous life in the United States, where the people of " God's own country " are firm in these two articles of faith : that any interference in the affairs of the United States is unjust, un- necessary, tyrannical and impious ; that any United States interference with another nation is a necessary and salutary effort on behalf of civilisation. Let no man of British blood complain. But let no one in making calculations of world policy be deceived into any other conclusion than that the United States is the great Imperial force of this century, and also the one Power that has enough of the splendid illusions of youth to indulge in crusading wars, for which Europe nowadays is too old and cautious. In the countries of Europe other than Great Britain that which I have stated is coming to be THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 77 generally recognised, and if at any time a combination could be proposed with any hope of success " to put America in her place," the combination would be formed and the Old World would grapple with the New to try conclusions. Without Great Britain, however, such an alliance would have at present no chance of success, and British adherence is not within the realm of practical thought to-day. The Imperialist tendency of United States policy is shown with particular clarity in the history of the Pacific Ocean. Very early in her life the vigorous young nation saw the Fates beckoning her across the Pacific. The downfall of the Spanish power in North America left the United States heir to a great stretch of rich coast line, including the noble province of California. Russia was ousted from the north-west coast of the Continent by a wise purchase. Before then, American whalers sailing out of Boston had begun to exploit the Southern Pacific. Their whaling trips brought back knowledge of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Group, and, following exactly the methods of British colonisation, American missionaries were the pioneers of American nationalisation. As far back as 1820 Hiram Bingham preached his first sermon at Honolulu from the text, " Fear not, for, behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy." A handsome church now marks the gratitude of his native converts. With equal justice Bingham's American compatriots might have set up a great statue to him as the first warden of the Marches of 78 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC the Pacific for the United States. For from that day the annexation of Hawaii was inevitable. The process took the familiar course. First the United States Republic exercised a benevolent suzerainty over the Hawaiian kingdom. Then the blessing of free institutions was bestowed on the natives by the foundation of an Hawaiian Republic. The next step was definite annexation. Following that, came steps for the formation of a great naval base at Honolulu. When I visited the Hawaiian Group in the spring of 1909 the work of fortifying Honolulu was being pushed on with great vigour, and the American military and civil authorities boasted of their intention to make it the Gibraltar of the Pacific. The city of Honolulu has at present a very small harbour, a little bay to which access is given by an opening in the coral reefs which surround the island. This port would hardly afford shelter to a squadron of cruisers. But to the left as one enters is Pearl Harbour, a magnificent stretch of land-locked water sufficient to float a great Fleet. But Pearl Harbour basin in its natural state is too well protected, there being no means of access except for very small boats. American energy is now remedying that, and a deep-water channel is being cut from Honolulu Harbour to Pearl Harbour to take vessels of the largest draught at all tides. When that channel is completed, Pearl Harbour will be at once com- modious and easily protected. The single narrow THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 79 entrance will be dominated by the guns of Malakiki Hill, a great eminence, somewhat like Gibraltar in shape, to the right of the town, which commands the sea-front east and west : and within Pearl Harbour the American Pacific Fleet will find a safe haven. It will be absolutely impregnable from the sea. Hostile ships approaching Honolulu would have to steer straight for Malakiki and then defile amid the coral reefs past its guns before the entrance to Pearl Harbour would open before them. But land defence has also to be taken into account. The chief male element of the Hawaiian population is not American, not native Hawaiian. It is Japanese. The Mikado's subjects represent now the largest fighting element in the population, out- numbering even the natives. These Japanese, im- ported as coolies for the sugar-fields, are mostly men of military training. Further influx of them has now been stopped, not under an Immigration Re- striction Act, but by private treaty with Japan ; and, as a measure of precaution, an Arms Registration Ordinance provides that no citizen shall have in his possession firearms unless he is licensed by the Government. But this precaution would be in vain if Japan ever seriously thought of using her 50,000 soldier-citizens in the Hawaiian Group against the United States ; for the whole of the fishing industry is in the hands of the Japanese, and their sampans could land arms at various places on the islands with ease. Such a contingency has been foreseen in the 80 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC laying out of Honolulu as a naval base, and the land fortifications are designed with the same thoroughness as those designed to beat off a sea attack. A glance at the map will show that the Power which holds Hawaii with a powerful Fleet can dominate the whole of the Northern Pacific, threaten- ing every point east and west. The American posi- tion there is weakened by only one circumstance, the great Japanese population. This, though it may not be recruited with further drafts of males from its native source, will always be a very considerable, if not the most considerable, element of the Hawaiian population, for most of the coolies are married, and the Japanese abroad as well as at home fills the cradle industriously. I remember on the morning of April 1, 1909, coming into Honolulu city from the Moana Hotel on the sea-beach, I found the tram rushed by Japanese at all the stopping places. Two cruisers of their navy had entered the harbour cruisers which were once upon a time the Russian Variag and Koreitz. All Japan in Honolulu was making holiday. A fleet of sampans (the Japanese fishing- vessel) sur- rounded the ships, which commemorated so signally a great and successful war. The water front was lined with Japanese, the women and children mostly in their national costume. One Japanese father came on to the tram with seven boys, the eldest of whom did not seem more than ten years of age. Asked, THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 81 he said that they were all his own children. There will never be a lack of a big Japanese population in Hawaii. The definite acquisition of Hawaii may be fairly dated from 1851. Before then there had been a significant proof of America's gaze turning westward by the appointment in 1844 of Mr Caleb Gushing as the United States Ambassador to the Court of China. A little later (1854) the American Power found the Japanese policy of exclusiveness intolerable, and United States warships broke a way into Japanese ports. It had also been decided by then that the task, originally undertaken by a French Company, of cutting a waterway across the Panama Isthmus should be the responsibility of the United States. British susceptibilities on the point were soothed by the Clayton -Bulwer treaty guaranteeing the neutrality of the canal, a treaty which was subse- quently abrogated in response to the increasing deference which the growing power of the American Republic could exact. That abrogation created the present position which gives the United States sole control of that canal, and the right to fortify its entrances. By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the United States, a Power which some people still insist on regarding as an essentially domestic char- acter interested only in purely American affairs, had established herself in a commanding strategical position in the North Pacific, had constituted her- 6 82 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC self the arbiter of Japanese national manners, and had obtained the control of the future waterway from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The second half of the same century was destined to see an even more remarkable Imperial expansion. The mis- government of Cuba by Spain became intolerable to American public opinion, and in 1898 war was declared with the avowed purpose of conferring the blessings of freedom on the people of Cuba. If one accepted the nonsensical view that the United States is a Power lifted above ordinary human nature by some mysterious racial alchemy, it would be difficult to understand why a war to free Cuba should also have been waged in another ocean to acquire the Philippines. But, looking at the matter in a sane light, it was natural that, being engaged in a war with Spain, the United States should strike at Spain wherever a blow was possible and should destroy the Spanish power in the Pacific Ocean as well as in the Caribbean Sea. Besides, the opportunity offered of stretching the arm of America right across the Pacific to the very coast of Asia. The Filipinos did not relish the substitution for the weak rule of Spain of the strong rule of the United States, and American Imperialism had the experience of having to force, by stern warfare on the liberated, acceptance of its role of liberator. Perhaps the experience taught it some sympathy with older players at the game of Empire-making : certainly it did not abate its ardour in the good work. THE UNITED STATES AN IMPERIAL POWER 83 So much for the past history of the United States in the Pacific. A forecast of her influence on the future of the ocean is clearly indicated by the past. The United States spread from the east of the North American continent to the west, because there is no method known to prevent the extension of a highly civilised, a young, an ardent nation at the expense of backward, effete and tired peoples. It was impossible that either the Red Indian tribes or the picturesque old settlements of the Californian Spanish should stand in the way of the American Republic stretching from ocean to ocean. Once the United States was established on the Pacific coast, it was equally inevit- able that the arm of her power should stretch across the ocean. The acquisition of the Hawaiian Group was necessary for the sound defence of the coast. The American trading ships which sought the coast of Asia and found barbaric barriers against commerce being battered down by European venturers, had to do as the other White Men did. The flag thus had to follow in the wake of the trade. It was all natural, necessary and ultimately beneficial to civilisation. Equally inevitable will be the future expansion of the United States in the Pacific. The overwhelming strength of her industrial organisation will give her a first call on the neutral markets of the ocean i.e. those markets to which she has the same right of access as her trade rivals. As the tendency shows for the area of those neutral markets to narrow through coming under the domination of various 84 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Powers, the United States will seek to extend her domination too. The protection of what she has will enforce the need of acquiring pther strategi- cal points. So her Pacific possessions will grow, almost unconsciously, just as the British Empire grew. CHAPTER VI GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC OFF the coast of China at a point where, in a strategical map the " spheres of influence " of Japan and the United States and Germany would impinge, is the island of Hong Kong, the Far East station of the British Empire. Further south, in the Malay Peninsula, is Singapore, standing guard over the entrance to the Indian Ocean. On these two coaling stations British naval power in the North Pacific is based. The abandonment of either of them is un- thinkable to-day, yet neither was taken possession of until the nineteenth century Singapore in 1819, Hong Kong in 1841. In the South Pacific there was shown an even stronger hesitation in acquiring territory. Why Great Britain entered so reluctantly into the Pacific as a colonising Power may probably be ex- plained by the fact that at the time the ocean came to be exploited British earth hunger had been satiated. The unsuccessful war which attempted to hold the American colonies to the Mother Country, had made her doubtful whether overseas dominions were altogether a blessing and whether the advantage to 85 86 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC be gained from them outweighed the responsibili- ties which their holding entailed. It seemed to be the natural conclusion from the American War of Independence, that once a colony or a group of colonies arrived at the stage of growth which allowed it to be of some use to the Mother Country, the inevitable next development was for it to throw off the bonds of kinship and enter upon a career of independence at the price of an expensive and humili- ating war to its parent. Thus, whilst British sailors were to the front in the exploration of the Pacific, British statesmen showed a great reluctance to take any advantage of their discoveries ; and it was a series of accidents rather than any settled purpose which planted the Anglo-Saxon race so firmly in this ocean. India, it must be noted, a century ago was a country having very little direct concern with the Pacific. The holding of the Indian Empire did not depend on any position in the Pacific. That situation has since changed, and Great Britain would be forced to an interest in the Pacific by her Indian Empire if she had no other possessions in the ocean. In an earlier chapter on Japan, something has been written concerning the reasons which would argue for the absence of an Imperial impulse in the Japanese islands and its presence in the British islands. The inquiry then suggested as to the instincts of expansion and dominion which were primarily responsible for the growth of the British Empire is full of fascination for the historian. If GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 87 it comes to be considered carefully, the Empire- making of the British people was throughout the result of a racial impulse working instinctively, spasmodically, though unerringly, towards an unseen goal, rather than of a designed and purposeful statesmanship. The racial origin of the British people dictated peremptorily a policy of oversea adventure, and that adventure led inevitably to colonisation. In the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the temperature of Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate singu- larly mild and promotive of fecundity. When the separation from the mainland came because of the North Sea cutting the English Channel, the Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their gracious environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores. With the Roman invasion there came to the future British race a benefit from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the Roman Power, holding as it did the mastery of the seas, freed the ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were generous winners and good colonists. Once their 88 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC power was established firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon, too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain. Thus from the very dawn of known history natural position and climate marked out Britain as the vat for the brewing of a strenuous blood. The sea served her "in the office of a wall or of a moat defensive to a house " to keep away all but the most vigorous of invaders. The charm and fertility of the land made it certain that a bold and vigorous invader would be tempted to become a colonist and not be satisfied with robbing and passing on. With the decay of the Roman Empire, and the withdrawal of the Roman legions to the defence of Rome, the Romanised Britons were left helpless. Civilisation and the growth of riches had made them at once more desirable objects of prey, and less able to resist attack. The province which Rome aban- GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 89 doned was worried on all sides by the incursion of the fierce clans of the north and the west. A decision, ultimately wise, judged by its happy results, but at the moment disastrous, induced some of the harried Britons to call in to their aid the Norsemen pirates, who at the time, taking advantage of the failing authority of Rome, were swarming out from Scandinavia and from the shores of the Baltic in search of booty. The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, were willing enough to come to Britain as mer- cenaries, even more willing to stay as colonists. An Anglo-Saxon wave swept over the greater part of ' England, and was stopped only by the mountains of Wales or of Scotland. That was the end of the Britons as the chief power in Britain, but they mingled with their conquerors to modify the Anglo- Saxon type with an infusion of Celtic blood. In the mountainous districts the Celtic blood continued to predominate, and does to this day. The Anglo-Saxons would have been very content to settle down peacefully on the fat lands which had fallen to them, but the piratical nests from which they themselves had issued still sent forth broods of hungry adventurers, and the invasions of the Danes taught the Anglo-Saxons that what steel had won must be guarded by steel. They learned, too, that any race holding England must rely upon sea-power for peaceful existence. After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the present British race, was the Norman. The Normans were not so much 90 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC foreigners as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while combined amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the British type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman a hard-fighting, stubborn adventurous race, which in its making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise, and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take. One can see that it was just the race for the work of explora- tion and colonisation. When this British people, thus constituted, were driven back to a sea- frontier by the French nation, it was natural that they should turn their energies overseas. To this their Anglo-Saxon blood, their Danish blood, their Norman blood prompted. The Elizabethan era, which was the era of the foundation of the British Empire overseas, was marked by a form of patriotism which was hard to distinguish in some of its manifestations from plain robbery. The fact calls for no particular condemnation. It was according to the habit of thought of the time. But it is necessary to bear in mind that the hunt for loot and not the desire for territory was the chief motive of the flashing glories of the Elizabethan era of GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 91 seamanship; for that is the explanation why there was left as the fruit of many victories few permanent settlements. Drake was the first English naval leader to penetrate to the Pacific. His famous circum- navigation of the world is one of the boldest exploits of history. Drake's log entry on entering the Pacific stirs the blood : " Now, as we were fallen to the uttermost parts of these islands on October 28, 1578, our troubles did make an end, the storm ceased, and all our calamities (only the absence of our friends excepted) were removed, as if God all this while by His secret Providence had led us to make this discovery, which being had according to His will, He stayed His hand." On this voyage Drake put in at San Francisco, which he named New Albion. He went back to Europe through the East Indies and around Africa. But Drake made no attempt at colonisation. Loot- ing of the Spanish treasure ships was the first and last object of his cruise. What was, according to our present lights, a more honourable descent upon the Pacific was that of Admiral Anson in the eighteenth century. He, in 1740, took a Fleet round the stormy Horn to subdue the Philippines and break the power of Spain in the Pacific. The force thought fitting for such an enterprise in those days was 961 men ! Anson did not subdue the Philip- pines ; but they were guarded by the scurvy, which 92 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC attacked the English Fleet, rather than by the Spanish might, and the little disease-racked English squadron was able to cripple the Spanish power in the Pacific by the mere dread of its presence. Anson took prizes and made them masquerade before the enemy's coast as hostile warships, and paralysed the Spanish commerce in those seas. He returned to England with only 335 men out of his original complement of 961. Practically all the deaths had been from disease. But again the idea of the Pacific expedition was not to colonise but to strike a blow at a rival European Power. It was not until the nineteenth century that Great Britain established herself on the western flank of the North Pacific. So far as the South Pacific was concerned British indifference was complete, and it was shared by other nations. In the days when the fabled wealth of the Indies was the magnet to draw men of courage and worth to perilous undertakings by sea and land, there was nothing in the South Pacific to attract their greed, and nothing, therefore, to stimulate their enterprise. The Spaniard, blundering on America in his quest for a western sea-passage to the ivory, the gold, and the spices of India, found there a land with more possibilities of plunder than that which he had originally sought. He was content to remain, looting the treasuries of the Mexicans and of the Peruvians for metals, and laying the forests of Central America under contribution GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 93 for precious woods. He ventured but little west- ward, and the Hawaiian Islands represented for a time the extreme western limit of his adventures. Following him for plunder came the English, and they too were content to sweep along the western coast of South America without venturing further towards the unknown west. From another direction the sea-route to India was sought by Portuguese, and Dutch, and English and French. Groping round the African coast, they came in time to the land of their desires, and found besides India and Cathay, Java, the Spice Islands, and other rich groups of the Malay Archipelago. But they, just as the Spaniards, did not venture west from South America ; and neither Portuguese, Dutch, French nor English set the course of their vessels south from the East Indies. It was thus Australia remained for many years an unknown continent. And when at last navigators, more bold or less bound to an immediate greed, touched upon the shores of Australia, or called at the South Sea Islands, they found little that was attrac- tive. In no case had the simple natives won to a greed for gold and silver, and so they had no accumulations of wealth to tempt cupidity. In the case of Australia the coast-line was dour and forbidding, and promised nothing but sterility. The exploring period in which the desire for plunder was the chief motive passed away, having spared the South Pacific. It was therefore the fate of 94 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Australia, of New Zealand, and of most of the islands of Polynesia and Melanesia, to be settled under happier conditions, and to be spared the excesses of cruelty which marked the European invasion of the West Indies and the Americas. The Newest World began its acquaintance with civilisation under fairly happy auspices. It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a scientific expedition brought the South Pacific before the attention of Britain. A transit of Venus across the sun promised to yield valuable knowledge as to the nature of solar phenomena. To observe the transit under the best conditions, astronomers knew that a station in the South Seas was necessary, and Lieutenant Cook, R.N., an officer who had already distinguished himself in the work of exploration, was promoted to be Captain and entrusted to lead a scientific expedition to Otaheite. Added to his commission was an injunction to explore the South Seas if time and opportunity offered. Captain Cook was of the type which makes time and opportunity. Certainly there was little in the equipment of his expedition to justify an extension of its duties after the transit of Venus had been duly observed. But he took it that his duty was to explore the South Seas, and explore them he did, incidentally annexing for the British Empire the Continent of Australia. That was in 1770. * But still there was so little inviting in the prospect of settlement in the South GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 95 Seas that it was some eighteen years before any effort was made to follow up by colonisation this annexation by Captain Cook. When the effort was made it was not on very dignified lines. The American colonies had at one time served as an outlet for the overflow of the British prisons. The War of Independence had closed that channel. The overcrowding of the British prisons became desperate, and, because it was necessary to find some relief for this not because it was considered advantageous to populate the new possession the First Fleet sailed for the foundation of Australia in 1788. We shall see in subsequent chapters how the reluctance of the governing Power of the British race in the Home Country to establish an Empire in the South Pacific found a curious response in the stubborn resoluteness of the colonists who settled in Australia and New Zealand to be more English than the English themselves, to be as aggressively Imperial- istic almost as the men of the Elizabethan era. (What might almost be called the " Jingoism " of the British nations in the South Pacific must have a very important effect in settling the mastery of that ocean.) In the present chapter the establishment of the British Power in the North Pacific chiefly will be considered. Singapore is to-day the capital of the three Straits Settlements Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, but it is the youngest of the three settlements. Malacca is the oldest. It was taken possession of by the 96 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Portuguese under Albuquerque in 1511, and held by them until 1641, when the Dutch were successful in driving them out. The settlement remained under the Government of the Dutch till 1795, when it was captured by the English, and held by them till 1818, at which date it was restored to the Dutch, and finally passed into British hands in pursuance of the treaty with Holland of 1824. By that treaty it was arranged that the Dutch should leave the Malay Peninsula, the British Government agreeing at the same time to leave Sumatra to the Dutch. When Malacca was taken possession of by the Portuguese in 1511, it was one of the great centres for the com- merce of the East ; but under Dutch rule it dwindled, and Penang acquired a monopoly of the trade of the Malayan Peninsula and Sumatra, together with a large traffic with China, Siam, Borneo, the Celebes, and other places in the Archipelago. When Singapore was established Penang in its turn had to yield the first place to the new city. Singapore was acquired for Britain by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, by virtue of a treaty with the Johore princes. It was at first subordinate to Bencoolen in Sumatra, but in 1823 it was placed under the Govern- ment of Bengal; it was afterwards incorporated in 1826, with Penang and Malacca, and placed under the Governor and Council of the Incorporated Settle- ments. Singapore is now one of the great shipping ports of the world, served by some fifty lines of steamers, and with a trade of over 20,000,000 tons GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 97 a year. The harbour of Singapore is fortified, and the port is indicated by one advanced school of British Imperialists as the future chief base of a Fleet, contributed to by India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, and kept to a standard of strength equal to that available to any other two Powers in the Pacific. Captain Macaulay, in a strategical scheme for Imperial Defence which has been received with deep attention in Great Britain, suggests : " The influence which an Indian Ocean Fleet, based on Colombo and Singapore, would have on Imperial Defence can hardly be exaggerated. The Indian Ocean a British Mediterranean to the Pacific with its openings east and west in our hands, is a position of readiness for naval action in the Western Pacific, the South Atlantic, or the Mediter- ranean. In the first case it influences the defence of Canada and the Australasian States ; in the second, that of South Africa. An Indian Ocean Fleet can reinforce, or be reinforced by the Fleets in European waters, if the storm centre be confined to Europe or to the Pacific. As regards the direct naval defence of the Australasian Provinces, no better position could be chosen than that of a Fleet based on Singapore, with an advanced base at Hong Kong, because it flanks all possible attack on them. An advanced flank defence is better than any direct defence of so large a coast-line as that of Australia from any point within it. Moreover, Singapore and 98 PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC Hong Kong are much nearer to the naval bases of any Powers in the Western Pacific than those countries are to Australia or to Canada. Hence, in operations for the defence of any Province, they favour offensive-defensive action on our part. And offensive-defensive is the great characteristic of naval power. Any East Asian Power contemplating aggression against Australasian or North American territory must evidently first deal with the Indian Ocean Fleet. "It is impossible to ignore the strategical and political significance of the Imperial triangle of India based on South Africa and the Australasian States, and its influence in the solution of the new problems of Imperial Defence. The effective naval defence of the self-governing Provinces is best secured by a Fleet maintained in the North Indian Ocean ; and the reinforcement of the British garrison in India is best secured by units of the Imperial Army maintained in the self-governing Provinces. If these two con- ditions are satisfied, the problem of the defence of the Mother Country is capable of easy solution." Hong Kong is of less strategical importance than Singapore. But it is marked out as the advanced base of British naval power in the North Pacific. It has one of the most magnificent harbours in the world, with an area of ten square miles. The granite hills which surround it rise between 2000 and 3000 feet high. The city of Victoria extends for four miles at the base of the hills which protect the south GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC 99 side of the harbour, and contains, with its suburbs, 326,961 inhabitants. It is the present base of the China squadron, and is fortified and garrisoned. As already stated, the conditions which some years ago made the mastery of the Pacific unimportant to India no longer exist, and the safety of the Indian Empire depends almost as closely on the position in the Pacific as the safety of England does on the position in the Atlantic. But, except by making some references in future chapters on strategy and on trade to her resources and possibilities, I do not propose to attempt any consideration of India in this volume. That would unduly enlarge its scope. In these days of quick communication, both power and trade are very fluid, and there is really not any country of the earth which has not in some way an influence on the Pacific. But so far as possible I have sought to deal only with the direct factors. Having noted the British possessions in the North Pacific, it is necessary to turn south and study the young " nations of the blood " below the Equator before estimating British Power in the Pacific. CHAPTER VII THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC THOSE who seek to find in history the evidence of an all-wise purpose might gather from the fantastic history of Australasia facts to confirm their faith. Far back in prehistoric ages, this great island was cut adrift from the rest of the world and left lonely and apart in the Southern Pacific. A few prehistoric mar- supials wandered over its territory and were hunted by poor nomads of men, without art or architecture, con- demned by the conditions of their life to step aside from the great onward current of human evolution. Over this land the winds swept and the rains fell, and, volcanic action having ceased, the mountains were denuded and their deep stores of minerals bared until gold lay about on the surface. Coal, copper, silver, tin, and iron too, were made plentifully accessible. At the same time enormous agricultural plains were formed in the interior, but under climatic conditions which allowed no development of vegetable or animal types without organised culture by a civilised people. Nature thus seemed to work consciously for the making of a country uniquely fitted for civilisation 100 THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC ' \^\ by a White Race, whilst at the same time ensuring that its aboriginal inhabitants should not be able to profit by its betterment, and thus raise themselves to a degree of social organisation which would allow them to resist an invading White Race. In the year when Captain Cook acquired the Continent of Australia for Great Britain, it was ripe for develop- ment by civilised effort in a way which no other territory of the earth then was ; and yet was so hopelessly sterile to man without machinery and the other apparatus of human science, that its aboriginal inhabitants were the most forlorn of the world's peoples, living a starveling life dependent on poor hunting, scanty fisheries and a few roots for existence. It needs no great stretch of fancy to see a mysterious design in the world-history of Australia. Here was a great area of land stuffed with precious and useful minerals, hidden away from the advancing civilisation of man as effectually as if it had been in the planet Mars. In other parts of the globe great civilisations rose and fell the Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Greek, the Roman, all drawing from the bowels of the earth her hidden treasures, and drawing on her surface riches with successive harvests. In America, the Mexican, Peruvian and ' other civilisations learned to gather from the great stocks of Nature, and built up fabrics of greatness from her rifled treasures. In Australia alone, amid dim, mysterious forests, the same prehistoric animals ](>