Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/158

 Japan by Articles V and VI of the Treaty of Peace above mentioned.

The Imperial Japanese Government engage that in regard to the leased territory, as well as in matters of railway construction and exploitation, they will as far as circumstances permit conform to the original agreements concluded between China and Russia. In case any question arises in the future on these subjects the Japanese Government will decide it in consultation with the Chinese Government.

Why this brevity? For very peculiar and indeed Machiavellian reasons.

No matter what the spirit of Tsarist Russia may have been in the long struggle to reach 'warm water', it is fact that every instrument the Northern Power wrote with the Peking Government from 1896 to her disastrous war with Japan at least carefully preserved the fiction that enterprises on Chinese soil were held in usufruct: Russia had the use and profit but not the property. This is of the highest importance. It was specifically provided, for instance, in the Port Arthur lease (Article VI), that "Port Arthur shall be a naval port for the sole use of Russian and Chinese men-of-war", i.e. it was an anchorage to which China had as