Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/150

 (the new treaties becoming operative in 1899).

It is from this date, then, that Japan definitely enters international politics; the rock on which she built was defeated China. Prior to that she had barely been more than a third-class Power, with little vision of greater days. Troubled by many internal problems, her efforts to cope with the reorganization of her finances had signally failed. It is true that the matter of her inconvertible paper money had been solved, and a Central Bank of Issue, modelled on the Belgian National Bank, established before Chinese wealth had been tapped. But without the stock of gold won by the Korean war it is difficult to believe that her exchange standard, which is the head and front of her banking and industrial system, could have been created. In this, as in other matters, Japan's prototype—absolutely and entirely—was Germany of the post 1870-71 period. Germany was her light and her guide—and almost every step that Prussia took after her defeat of France was sedulously copied.

Although she emerged from her Chinese war financially satisfied, Japan was in many ways greatly embittered. Her original Treaty of Peace, which had included the cession of the Liaotung peninsula, had been torn up by the