and, forbearingly and ineffectively, Mexico, for financial incompetence or inability to preserve order. The small state of the future, if it has any self-respect, will not even desire to crawl behind the pseudo-protection of the discredited principle of neutralization. Every nation, great and small, will desire and be compelled to stand on its own merits and character, manfully shouldering its responsibility. It is not merely that neutralization fails to protect from attack from the outside. If a nation were really to trust in its guaranteed inviolability as, happily, Belgium did not, as Holland and Switzerland do not, neutrality would prevent growth from within, for it would emasculate and sterilize its victim. A nation cannot be a nation in more than name if it declines to accept full international responsibility.

Democracy to grow healthily must grow slowly; and, as I view it, it will be to the mutual advantage of both America and the Philippines to walk yet awhile in close organic relation. America has had no more sobering or enlightening experience than her direct responsibility for the well-being of a people like the Filipinos. It goes without saying that when once America's governmental authority in the Philippines has reached the vanishing point, the flag that has guaranteed and presided over an unprecedented period of peace, prosperity, and progress, will go down forever, leaving the Islands to their own self-protection as well as their own self-government. But I still cling to the hope that our school, so ably and hopefully established by American men and patriots, will not close its doors until the Philippines shall have honorably graduated into a liberty that will be as secure as it will be to the liking of its citizens and to the credit of democracy.

THE FAR-EASTERN PROBLEM1

J. O. P. BLAND

[J. O. P. Bland (1863– ) is an English journalist and author who has spent most of his life in the Far East. He has been connected with the Chinese Customs Service, been the London Times correspondent at Shanghai, and was in Peking from 1907-1910. He has also traveled extensively in Japan since 1887, and during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-1905 he assisted the Japanese secret service in China. His wife is an American. The present article, from which some paragraphs of temporary interest have been omitted, furnishes an interpretation of Japanese aims in the Far East, which, while not entirely unchallenged, is helpful in forming American opinion on this vexing question.]

At the conclusion of the present struggle, the exhaustion of European nations must leave the United States and Japan relatively much stronger and richer than they were. Both powers will be deeply and directly interested in the arrangement of the conditions under which peace is eventually restored. Japan, as an ally of the Quadruple Entente, and America, possibly as a mediator, must have a voice in the international conference which will define the future frontiers of Europe and many subsidiary questions. Among these, the rights and interests of the powers in China, and the future of that country as an independent state, present problems which, unless carefully studied in advance, may well create great difficulties and even new casus belli for the powers whose territories border on the Pacific Ocean. The shadow of the Far-Eastern question has frequently been darkly cast between the United States and Japan in recent years, and never more ominously than when the renewal of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance (1911) relieved England of the duty of assisting 1 From Century Magazine, January, 1916. Reprinted -- nermission.

Japan against any nation with which Great Britain might have concluded a treaty of arbitration. But much of the trouble has been due to ignorance: a closer study of the question should serve to reassure public opinion in the United States and to put an end to the suspicious uneasiness which finds expression in the unbalanced writings of a Homer Lea or the diplomatic vagaries of a Philander Knox.

Japanese statecraft, whether displayed in Manchuria, in Magdalena Bay, or in the Marshall Islands, points to a perfectly consistent and legitimate policy, which has only to be rightly appreciated in order to remove all immediate prospect of serious friction between Nippon and Anglo-Saxon peoples. The Japanese, who would not hesitate for a moment to exclude from their country Chinese or other cheap labor, are fully alive to the economic necessity which has compelled America, Canada, and Australia to frame their Asiatic exclusion acts. Beyond all question they recognize the legitimate protective purpose of these acts; what they object to, and very properly, is the implied assumption of the racial and moral superiority of the white races. They are well aware that the objection to Chinese laborers in the Pacific States and to Japanese children in the Californian schools is just as directly due to economic causes as the anti-Semitic movement in Russia. They know that the Asiatic is excluded not because he would contaminate, but simply because he would devour, the white man in open-labor competition. England, which professes to believe in free trade and unrestricted immigration, can hardly meet the Japanese on this question in the spirit of "frank and full consultation" for which the text of the alliance provides. Frankness must stultify either the British Government or the acts of the dominions overseas. Similarly, with its Monroe Doctrine for America and its open door for Asia, with its professed belief in the right of every human being freely to change his nationality and domicile, the United States is not in a position to discuss the exclusion acts with Japanese statesmen

on its accustomed lofty ground of political morality. The Anglo-Saxon's ultimate argument, conceal it as we may, lies in the stern law of self-preservation, backed by force.

Now, if there is one fact which stands out more prominently than any other in the history of the last ten years, — that is, since the conclusion of the Treaty of Portsmouth, it is that Japanese statesmen are prepared to recognize and accept these self-protective activities of the Anglo-Saxon races, provided only that Japan also is allowed to follow her own national instincts of self-preservation on the lines of geographical gravitation dictated by her economic necessities; that is to say, by expansion into China's thinly peopled dependencies of Manchuria and Mongolia. Even a cursory study of the recent history of the Far East points clearly to this conclusion. Japan is not prepared to accept the Monroe Doctrine and the Asiatic exclusion acts and at the same time to acquiesce in the traditional policy of the commercial powers, which insists on maintenance of the status quo in China.

It is true that by the terms of the Portsmouth Treaty and other conventions Japan pledged herself to abstain from any encroachments on the territorial integrity and sovereignty of China; but her diplomacy, trained in the best European traditions, is unsurpassed in the gentle art of treaty-making and treaty-breaking. It has learned to a nicety the time and place for "extra-textual interpretations" and the conclusive value of the fait accompli. As far as China is concerned, the protective clauses of the Portsmouth Treaty, greeted with intense satisfaction in America, were never likely to be effective in Manchuria even had Russia and Japan remained on guard against each other in their respective spheres. Those who hoped and believed that China, in accordance with that treaty, would be allowed to develop the resources of this fertile region without interference and for her own benefit knew little of the imperative necessity which had compelled Japan to fight Russia for Port Arthur. The same necessity led her, immediately after the conclusion of the Portsmouth

Treaty, to come to terms with Russia for a division of the spoil under conditions which virtually insured the benevolent acquiescence of England and France. Upon the conclusion of this pact of spoliation, diplomatically known as an entente, the Portsmouth Treaty became a dead letter; it had never been more than a time-and-face-saving device.

The results were many and important. Not only was China not permitted to develop her commerce in Manchuria by the extension of her northern railways, not only did Russia and Japan separately and jointly veto the construction by English and American capitalists of the Chinchou-Aigun trunk-line; but they went much further, asserting and extending their special rights and interests over China's loosely held dependency of Mongolia, forbidding its colonization by Chinese subjects, and establishing their usual trading and mining monopolies. By the end of 1910, China's sovereignty throughout all the region north of the Great Wall was evidently doomed. Mr. Secretary Knox, under the direction of American financiers, made spasmodic, but futile, attempts to prevent the inevitable, by his scheme for the neutralization of Manchurian railways, by forlorn excursions into dollar diplomacy, and by earnest appeals to the open-door pledges of all concerned; their only result was to draw Russia and Japan more closely together in the bonds of a most profitable pact. In 1910, Korea, whose independence had been solemnly guaranteed by Japan and by all the powers, was "persuaded" to sign away the remnants of her sovereignty and become an integral part of the Japanese Empire. The scraps of paper, which were consigned to oblivion by the European and American chancelleries at this passing of the Hermit Kingdom, had ceased to represent either actualities or vital interests. This being so, the forces of geographical gravitation met with no resistance, and the disappearance of an economically unprofitable nation evoked only perfunctory valedictory articles in the press.