e enthroned in Europe, owing to the fact that an active element of
opposition to such concepts was to be found in their own policies, a
vast change has undoubtedly been recently worked, making it certain
that the claims of nationalism are soon to be given the same force and
value in the East as in the West. But before there can be any question
of Asia for the Asiatics being adopted as a root principle by the whole
world, it will have to be established in some unmistakable form that the
surrender of the policy of conquest which Europe has pursued for four
centuries East of the Suez Canal will not lead to its adoption by an
Asiatic Power under specious forms which hide the glittering sword. If
that can be secured, then the present conflict will have truly been a
War of Liberation for the East as well as for the West. For although
Japan has been engaged for some years in declaring to all Asiatics under
her breath that she holds out the hand of a brother to them, and dreams
of the days when the age of European conquests will be nothing but a
distant memory, her actions have consistently belied her words and shown
that she has not progressed in political thought much beyond the crude
conceptions of the Eighteenth Century. Thus Korea, which fell under her
sway because the nominal independence of the country had long made it
the centre of disastrous international intrigues, is governed to-day as
a conquered province by a military viceroy without a trace of autonomy
remaining and without any promise that such a regime is only temporary.
Although nothing in the undertakings made with the Powers has ever
admitted that a nation which boasts of an ancient line of kings, and
which gave Japan much of her own civilization, should be stamped under
foot in such manner, the course which politics have taken in Korea has
been disastrous in the extreme ever since Lord Lansdowne in 1905, as
British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, pointed out in a careful dispatch
to the Russian Government that Korea was a region which fell naturally
under the sway of Japan. Not only has a tragic fate overcome the sixteen
million inhabitants of that country, but there has been a covert
extension of the principles applied to them to the people of China.

Now if as we say European concepts are to have universal meaning, and if
Japan desires European treatment, it is time that it is realized that
the policy followed in Korea, combined with the attempt to extend tha