Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/101

 Far East are the natural children of this strange mésalliance between an island-empire and the Asiatic mainland; and the almost savage manner in which Japan has tried to seize sole control of the Ussuri railway and the Chinese Eastern railway—deliberately wrecking for many months all American attempts under the Stevens Commission to better Russian communications, and starving millions of people in Siberia in consequence, form a sermon on political morality as eloquent as the Sermon on the Mount.

These things have a close and intimate connection with the Chinese question: they are in the nature of the necessary introduction to the settlement. For unless they are closely and intimately associated in the mind as a very large part of the reason why China makes no progress, it is impossible to convey to those who live far distant from these scenes an adequate appreciation of the reality of China's difficulties. The presence of Japan in Korea as lord of the soil; her holding of two fortified areas on the Chinese coast, with their connecting railway systems; her advance into Transbaikalia and inner Mongolia with important military forces, all these things are every whit as paralysing to Peking as the occupation of