t
treatment to soil where China rightly claims undisputed sovereignty,
forms an insuperable barrier to Japan being admitted to the inner
council of the nations.[31] No one wishes to deny to Japan her proper
place in the world, in view of her marvellous industrial progress, but
that place must be one which fits in with modern conceptions and is not
one thing to the West and another to the East. Even the saying which was
made so much of during the Russian war of 1904, that Korea in foreign
hands was a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan--has been shown to be
inherently false by the lessons of the present struggle, the Korean
dagger-point being 120 sea miles from the Japanese coast. Such arguments
clearly show that if the truce which was hastily patched up in 1905 is
to give way to a permanent peace, that can be evolved only by locking on
to the Far East the principles which are in process of being vindicated
in Europe. In other words, precisely as Poland is to be given autonomy,
so must Korea enjoy the same privileges, the whole Japanese theory of
suzerainty on the Eastern Asiatic Continent being abandoned. To
re-establish a proper balance of power in the Far East, the Korean
nation, which has had a known historical existence of 1,500 years, must
be reinstated in something resembling its old position; for Korea has
always been the keystone of the Far Eastern arch, and it is the
destruction of that arch more than anything else which has brought the
collapse of China so perilously near.

Once the legitimate aspirations of the Korean people have been
satisfied, the whole Manchurian-Mongolian question will assume a
different aspect, and a true peace between China and Japan will be made
possible. It is to no one's interest to have a Polish question in the
Far East with all the bitterness and the crimes which such a question
must inevitably lead to; and the time to obviate the creation of such a
question is at the very beginning before it has become an obsession and
a great international issue. Although the Japanese annexation may be
held to have settled the question once and for all, we have but to point
to Poland to show that a race can pass through every possible
humiliation and endure every possible species of truncation without
dying or abating by one whit its determination to enjoy what happier
races have won.

The issue is a vital one. China by her recent acts has given a
categorical and unmistakable reply to all the