Page:A wandering student in the Far East vol.1 - Zetland.djvu/60

30 prove sufficient for their purpose if they are successful in organising a fighting machine sufficiently powerful, in reputation and in fact, to make it unworth the while of other nations to attack them. With the advent of the present century the partition of China among the Powers has passed from the realm of practical politics, and formal record of her policy of preserving the integrity of the Chinese Empire has been registered by Great Britain in her latest treaty of alliance with Japan. The scheme for the reorganisation of the Chinese army, which has been described by European military experts as being, as far as its paper provisions are concerned, above criticism, provides for an army of 36 divisions of 12,000 men each (432,000 men) by the year 1917. There are at the present time at least 100,000 troops drilled and equipped on modern lines, and though their fighting efficiency is impaired by the fact that they are armed with divers patterns of rifles—Japanese, Mauser, and Marmlicher—and Japanese, Krupp, and Kreusot guns, and that some at least of the necessary accessories of war exist on paper