Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/88

 the Manchurian war to prove that Japan had deliberately and categorically offered to abstain from all interference in Manchuria if Russia would enter into a similar commitment regarding Korea. The fact that the Japanese had been forced to fight a ruinous war, with no real margin of safety either on land or on sea, because that offer had been refused, in their opinion entitled them to a consideration which the jealous Western world was not giving them. It is necessary to insist upon this half-forgotten matter even to the point of weariness, as it is the secret of much tortuous diplomacy. For when the Neutralization scheme fell through, and Japan found the alternative plan for a parallel railway (the Chinchow-Aigun trunk-line) being pushed by British and American interests in 1909, she became convinced that a new battle had already commenced having for object her economic restriction on the Asiatic mainland. And although the formal annexation of Korea was successfully accomplished in 1910, in 1911 the British Government insisted on a revision of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance Treaty, inserting a clause which made the inapplicability of that instrument to America absolutely clear.

It was with these things weighing heavily on