Page:The Ifs of History (1907).pdf/171

 intervention proceeds in Asiatic countries is well known. It has always had but slight regard for native sovereignty, no matter how high the state of social or artistic or intellectual development on the part of the native races affected. British administrators, or, if Japan had retained its nominal sovereignty, British "residents" or agents, would really have governed the country through the Tycoon or the Mikado, or both—preferably the Tycoon, for he was a military ruler, and affairs could have been handled more readily through him.

Events in Japan must have anticipated the subsequent history of Egypt, on a much more magnificent scale. Again, though there would have been a readier entrance for American and European trade than in the case of Russian intervention, the best of everything Japanese would certainly have gone to England. And once again, the free, independent,