Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/69

 is better to hit the wrong man rather than no man at all. . . . That was the curious Chinese question thrusting itself on his immature attention, a vast question in many ways, yet nevertheless inherently simple, since it is made up of the crudest economic problems, which have not changed throughout the ages.

Since those days of thirty-five years ago a good deal of water has flowed under the bridges and a good many changes have come. War, and war's alarms, were responsible a quarter-of-a-century ago for the handing-over of China to the international money-lender. With indebtedness came complications and irritations. The year 1900 was signalized by that big 'blow-out' called the Boxer rising; and the settlement which followed was still further complicated by the complete breakdown in 1905 of the fiction of Russian invincibility which had so obsessed the late Lord Salisbury and the present Lord Lansdowne that to it alone must be traced most of the disasters of our own hectic decade. The fabric of Far Eastern relations having been based on balance-of-power, which is only another name for a refusal to face the inevitable, the declension of Russia destroyed the patchwork scheme, and made one of two things certain—that either