Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/66

 The rest of the Powers quickly followed England's example in the matter of extraterritoriality, and in her greatly improved position among the nations it was essential for Japan

This is one of the deeper reasons for Japanese action in Korea. Although China agreed to the complete independence of Korea almost after her first defeats, Japan was aiming at very different objects. The cession of the Liaotung, or the area included in the old willow palisade, plus the annexed Yalu zone, was but one small thing, just as Formosa was another. The real prize was the reversal of the old relationship between China and Japan—that suzerain China should become the tributary and tributary Japan the suzerain. Everything else is subordinate to this root-idea. The intervention of Russia and her satellites in 1895, which was followed by the brutal Japanese murder of the Korean Queen and the loss of all Korean influence, and then by the Manchurian war—these and many other things are but interruptions in the grand policy—inter-