Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/85

 whether any one of the three Powers sincerely entertained the purpose they avowedly sought to promote, namely, the preservation of China's integrity. Nothing in their records indicated that the interests of an Oriental State had ever been an object of solicitude to them, and Japan had no choice but to conclude that the motive of their arbitrary interference was to prevent her own aggrandisement rather than to avert her enemy's dismemberment. To secure herself against a possible repetition of such humiliations, and to support the dignity of her newly won position as the leading Power in the Orient, she expanded her armaments. Many onlookers averred that alone among the civilised nations of the world she might have confided in the forbearance of other States and pursued the even tenor of her way, unarmed and uninsured. But she did not derive any such conviction either from her own experience or from her observation of international usages, and it must be admitted that her misgivings found curiously quick and signal justification in subsequent events.

For little more than three years after the three Powers' ostentatious parade of concern for China's integrity, Germany seized Kiao-chow and asserted her claim to a hinterland embracing the greater part of Shantung province.

This act of spoliation was effected by Germany without giving any sort of warning to China, although the relations between the two empires