Page:American Diplomacy in the Orient - Foster (1903).djvu/423



foregoing pages constitute a narrative of the disinterested efforts of the United States to establish and maintain friendly relations and free commercial intercourse with the countries of the Orient. It has been seen that whenever the American representatives have approached the governments of China, Japan, Korea, and Siam, it was with the statement that their far-away people cherish no scheme of territorial aggrandizement in that region of the world, and that their only desire was to secure mutual benefit from the establishment of trade and to extend the influence of Christian civilization.

An event is now to be recorded which introduced a new factor in the relations of the United States with the Orient and which materially affected its political and commercial conditions and changed its foreign policy. From being a distant country concerned only in unselfish friendship and industrial development, it suddenly and unexpectedly became sovereign over a numerous Asiatic people and possessed of an extensive territorial domain in that quarter of the globe which was to be defended by an American army and navy.

The war with Spain in 1898 was entered upon by the government and people of the United States with no