Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/151

 action of Russia, Germany, and France, who had interposed a blunt fiat backed by battleships; and she had been forced to return to China what she had already annexed. She was bitterly hurt by this—both on account of the international humiliation, and because her real motives had been misunderstood. She had believed that the only method of terminating Manchu intrigue in the Korean peninsula was completely to cut off all land-contact between the Courts of Peking and Seoul; the Liaotung was therefore desired not so much as a Japanese colony as a buffer-territory between two capitals united by historic ties, and by a thousand-mile Imperial highway along which Korea's tribute missions had journeyed for so many centuries. Obsessed with this point of view, which was totally unrelated to world-politics, the shock to her pride was very great when she was peremptorily shown that the Yellow Sea was not a lake, but part of a general scheme of things which she must envisage as a whole with her eyes specially fixed on the heavy guns of the ships from the West.

The action of England had been different from the action of the three Continental Powers. England had declined to be associated with the intervention, although during