Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/154

 gorically refused all real accommodation; she bluffed and hoped against hope to the very end. Japan fought desperately and won a qualified victory which would have been much more justly settled had it not been for the impetuosity of the late President Roosevelt. The Treaty of Peace, which would have been signed in Peking and not at Portsmouth, had all the surrounding circumstances been properly understood, was an unfortunate instrument; like the Lansing-Ishii Notes, it was a monument of haste rather than of prescience. A wiser policy would have regarded the Scriptural invocation regarding peace-makers as politically unsuitable to the circumstances and left the protagonists strictly alone. Had that been done both would have come to their senses and all history might have been different in the West as in the East; for both were not more than four or five months off complete exhaustion. Empty ammunition-wagons, depleted battalions, and ominous murmurs from the civil population—these are the only things that bureaucratic governments really appreciate. Neither Russia nor Japan could have faced in 1905 another winter campaign.