Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/49

 had behind him all the prestige he had won by crushing, with General Gordon's aid, the last despairing efforts of the Taiping rebels. It was his particular duty to contrive machinery to resist foreign pressure; to limit international intercourse to the coastline; and thus to prevent clashes between an ignorant proletariat and a defiant mercantilism. Already the foundations of the Chinese State had been so sapped by internal discontent and external attacks that very little more was required to bring irreparable dynastic disaster. Japan was then a very small issue: but Korea, infallibly and inevitably, provided the meeting-place for the inherent rivalry between two nations.

In 1868 Japan had informed the Seoul Government of the restoration of the Meiji emperor through the intermediary of the Daimyo of Tsushima; but her demands for an acknowledgment of vassalage had been peremptorily rejected. War might even then have come had it not been for the wisdom of the statesmen of the Restoration period. The persistent efforts of the Western maritime Powers to enter into trade relations with the Hermit Kingdom had filled the coasts of Korea with alarm almost from the beginning of the nineteenth century,