Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/96

 to the peace of the East, that they saw themselves under the painful duty of expelling Japan, the appropriation of the whole of Manchuria by Russia in 1900 did not seem to Germany to affect the integrity of China in any way, to menace her security, or to jeopardise the tranquillity of the Orient; seemed to France an arrangement that she could conscientiously support; and seemed to Russia an act not at all inconsistent with her previous attitude towards Japan.

Russia has thus extended her dominion to the very boundaries of Korea. She need only step across the Yalu River and she will find herself in a country inviting aggression by helplessness, promising to repay it by ample resources, and strategically essential to the security of her position in the Far East. She has conventions with Japan which, if faithfully observed, would prevent her from exercising in Korea any influence baleful to Japanese interests. Similarly at one time she had a convention with Great Britain placing Afghanistan entirely outside the sphere of Russian influence. Yet, in a time of peace, she deliberately instigated Afghanistan to make war upon England. Korea has now become the Afghanistan of the Far East, with this difference that whereas Afghanistan suggests itself to Russia merely as a weapon for harassing England in Asia in order to force her hand in Europe, Korea presents itself to her as a possession which would round off her newly acquired empire in the Far