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 transformed by the conclusion of the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902. In spite of many blunders and much futile groping about for mere palliatives, the British Government had fortunately never lost sight of the great issues involved in the Far Eastern question. The failure of the various expedients to which they had had recourse had in itself demonstrated the necessity of working out the solution on entirely fresh lines, based on the fullest recognition of a new and most important factor. That factor was Japan, and, to the credit of British statesmanship be it said, this country was the first to appreciate its value.

The future historian will not improbably give to the evolution of Japan in the era of Meiji the foremost place amongst the great events of the second half of the nineteenth century. Only fifty-one years have even now elapsed since the nations of the West, applying to Japan the same forceful methods that had already been applied to China, compelled her most reluctantly to reopen to foreign intercourse the doors which she had kept hermetically sealed for two hundred years against the outer world. Happily for Japan, isolation had not meant in her case, as it had in that of China, stagnation and degeneracy. She had preserved with her pristine forms of society the pristine virtues of a race imbued with great ideals of self-sacrifice and devotion to the common weal, and at the same time endowed with great intellectual capacity. The extraordinary rapidity with which, under the guidance of her ruling classes, she borrowed from the alien civilization of the West its scientific and mechanical equipment, together with many of its outward forms and methods, was so unprecedented a phenomenon that it provoked at first nothing but scepticism, and, from superficial observers, derision. The relations between this country and Japan had, indeed, assumed a very friendly character as soon