Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/99

 cured that no hostile forces can seize this hilly promontory which reaches out to within one hundred miles of her coasts. Had that unimaginative statesman Lord Lansdowne really known anything of the history of Asia, he would never have indited his famous dispatch to the Russian Government in 1905, in which he declared that Korea was a region which fell naturally under the sway of Japan—when there was voluminous history since the days of the T'ang dynasty ( 600-900) to prove that Korea fell naturally under the sway of China, and that whenever another Power seized control, it was only to use it as a highway to attack Cathay. . ..

The annexation, we say, was an intolerable and unnecessary mistake because of its immediate non-Korean consequences. It made Japan formally and perpetually a Continental Power—that is, gave her an actual stake on the mainland of Asia, a state of affairs which had never previously existed. It committed her to maintaining a large garrison to overawe the Korean population, which was violently hostile. It incited her to extend this land-empire under thinly-concealed forms into Southern Manchuria, by giving the railway system which she had captured from Russia a special character,