Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/89

 But Japan preferred to have England planted at Wei-hai-wei. She evacuated the place in Great Britain's favour, thus giving a further and unequivocal indication of her political tendency.

Meanwhile the Chinese Court, seeing its territories filched from it piece by piece, and recognising that a chief source of danger lay in the apathy of its own subjects, took steps to promote the organisation of volunteer associations in the provinces adjacent to the capital. It does not belong to the scope of this history to describe the processes by which a movement, possibly legitimate in official inception, assumed, in the summer of 1900, the character of an anti-foreign rebellion, which, breaking out in Shantung, spread to the metropolitan province of Chili, and resulted in a situation of extreme peril for the foreign communities in Tientsin and Peking. There did not indeed appear to be any possibility of despatching a European or American force with sufficient promptitude to save the legations in Peking, which were beleaguered by a crowd of Chinese soldiers and insurgents enormously more numerous than the little band of defenders. Hence the eyes of the world turned towards Japan, whose proximity to the scene of disturbance enabled her to intervene expeditiously, and whose troops were believed to be qualified for such a task.

But Japan hesitated. Knowing now with what suspicion and distrust the development of