Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/90

 her resources and the growth of her military strength were regarded by some European peoples, and aware that she had been admitted to the comity of Western nations on sufferance, she shrank, on the one hand, from seeming to grasp at an opportunity for armed display, and, on the other, from the solecism of obtrusiveness in the society of strangers. Not until Europe and America made it quite plain that they needed and desired her aid did she send twenty thousand men to Chili, where they acted a fine part, first in the storming of Tientsin, and subsequently in the relief of Peking, which had to be approached in the fierce heat of a Chinese midsummer under most trying conditions. Fighting side by side with European and American soldiers and under the eyes of competent military critics, the Japanese acquitted themselves in such a manner as to establish a high military reputation. Their success in the war of 1894-1895 had been largely discounted by foreign critics, who attributed it, not to the prowess of the victors, but to the total helplessness of the vanquished, and who denied that any inference might be drawn as to the quality of Japanese fighting material for the purposes of a struggle with Western troops. But the Campaign of 1900 in Chili furnished an unequivocal test. There could no longer be any doubt about her military capacity, and since also in the subsequent negotiations she uniformly ef-