Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/156

 concession—this curious connection was never rightfully considered, and China was treated as negligible. Manchuria being as Chinese as the metropolitan province of Chihli, a proper and decent neighbourly spirit, not to speak of expediency and foresight, should have prompted Japan to insist on the war settlement being a tripartite agreement to which three contracting parties—Russia, China, and Japan—put their signatures, thus doing away entirely with the past causes of friction. But this would have meant the banishment of obscurantism; and Japan abroad thrives on organized opposition to inquiry and reform as on nothing else. To put it squarely, Japan in 1905, had she been honest, should have demanded that the whole Manchurian railway enterprise be retroceded to China—the trans-Manchurian lines as well as the South Manchurian—and then converted into a standard-gauge railway, after a lapse of time just sufficient to allow Russia to build the Amur railway and link up her Far Eastern possessions on her own territory. Had Japan taken this one step she would have made China her ally for all time; trebled her influence in every part of her neighbour's vast territories; and so handicapped Westernism that it is extremely