Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/22

 aspect, than the sober fact that they form part of a great ring welded by volcanic energy in the Pacific Ocean, and that still, from time to time, they shudder with uneasy memories of the fiery forces that begot them.

Eastern Asia thrusts two long slender arms into far oriental waters: Kamtchatka in the north, Malacca in the south; and between these lies a giant girdle of islands, holding in its embrace Siam, Cochin China, the Middle Kingdom, Korea, and the eastern end of the Great White Czar's dominions, thus extending from latitude 50° north to the equator. When Commodore Perry anchored at Uraga, in 1854, the empire of Japan stretched along two-fifths of this girdle. Beginning on the south, at Cape Sata, the lowest point of the Island of Nine Provinces (Kiushu), it ended, on the north, with a disputed fragment of Saghalien, and an unsettled number of the attenuated filament of islets called the Kuriles. Since then, the empire has been pushed ten degrees southward. Now, including the Riukiu (Loochoo) Islands and Formosa, it constitutes three-fifths of the girdle—a distance of two thousand miles—and extends over thirty degrees of latitude and thirty-five of longitude. Its expansion has followed the law of geographical affinities—temporarily transgressed in the case of the United States only, and ultimately verified by their history also:—southward the star of empire has taken its way. One loss of territory