Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/149



have reached the last phase—the question of Japan.

Until Japan defeated China in 1894, the condition of her armaments, her finance, and her industry was of a modest and even primitive nature. She had an army of a hundred thousand soldiers; a navy comprising a few protected cruisers; a silver currency mixed with the remains of an abortive National Bank system copied (on the late Prince Ito's recommendation) from America; and a foreign trade of a hundred million dollars a year. By her Treaty of Peace, however, she received forty million pounds in sterling; established a gold exchange standard, which was maintained by keeping in London her main stock of the yellow metal (a practice continued even to-day, which has a profound and little-understood effect on Far Eastern politics); and almost immediately recovered from Western nations her passionately contested tariff and the judicial autonomy