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Rh this country." He warned us against "a coalition of other powers." He pointed out that the world is becoming dangerous to those who have no allies, and that we must have them. So we had allied ourselves with Japan! In criticism hereof, it was pointed out, with force, that this was the first time that we had taken any similar action, that the treaty deprived us to some extent of the freedom of individual initiative, and that we had embarked upon a future which no one could at that moment foresee.

Since all alliances are melted down one day or another, this one will some day vanish naturally with the rest. But its consequences seem likely to be permanent.

The Japanese treaty provided, in its original shape, that if two powers, or, in its later shapes of 1905 and 1911, that if one power, attacked Japan, we were to go to war on her behalf. This involved an important obligation, but was not the main thing. In the view of Europe, England in taking this step had definitely turned the tables on the West; had preferred alliance with an oriental power only yesterday barbarous; had openly proclaimed her own non-European sympathies, or, at least, had avowed the preponderance of her Asiatic interests; had cast away any pretence of co-operation with Christendom; and had, by that act, justified all that the chancelleries had suspected of her treachery. For all eyes saw that England had thus definitely forbidden Europe to overwhelm Japan, to divide