Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/505

Rh America, Germany, and Russia were left unratified; and it was proved that the representatives of the other great powers had acted wisely in acting slowly, and had saved their respective governments from a humiliating rebuff.

A few months slipped by, and the tide once more began to flow. The native press whether inspired from headquarters we cannot say started a new watchword, which, being interpreted, signified "treaty revision on a footing of equality," This was a fair phrase; but on examination, it turned out to mean simply that the foreign powers should concede everything, and Japan nothing at all. In fact, it was a case of

The claim was preposterous; but—for the impossible does some times come to pass—it actually was granted! Who knows? Perhaps Great Britain thought thereby to obtain the Japanese alliance; perhaps it was only that she wanted to patch up, somehow and once for all, an old difference which had degenerated into a bore. Anyhow, in 1894, the Radical English ministry of the hour consented to a new treaty on the peculiar Dutch lines just mentioned. Hereby, either explicitly or else implicitly by the recognition of her legal codes (some of which had not even been published at that date!), Japan obtained the abolition of exterritoriality, full jurisdiction over British subjects, the right to fix her own import dues, the monopoly of the coasting trade, and the exclusion of British subjects from the purchase of land, or even from the leasing of land for agricultural or mining purposes. In exchange, Great Britain obtained ? The only items revealed by a microscopic scrutiny were that every one would be permitted to travel unmolested in the interior, but in practice this privilege was enjoyed already, as would naturally be the case in any country ranking as civilised,—and that property might be leased in the interior for residential and commercial purposes, a doubtful