Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/507

Rh The British treaty once concluded, other powers followed suit. To some of them the nature of the terms mattered little; for the preponderance of British commercial and residential interests has always been so great in Japan as almost to make it a case of "Eclipse first, and the rest nowhere." The United States—the only power which might have been expected to stand out for better terms—was precluded from so doing, partly by her traditional policy of exceptional condescension towards Japan, partly, as it would seem, by the fact of her government, like that of Great Britain, having failed to appreciate in all its practical details, the position which affairs would assume when the old order should have been abrogated and the new set up in its stead. Meanwhile the China war of 1894-5 took place, Japan's marvellous successes in which made resistance to any of her demands increasingly difficult. The German and French negotiators, however, kept their heads; and under the most favoured nation clause, resident Britishers and Americans by a stroke of good luck, nowise thanks to the good management of their rulers—have come to share in certain ameliorations stipulated for by other powers:—their doctors, for instance, may practise, and their newspapers may continue to exist, though subject now to the Japanese censure, no longer independent as of old.

Such is the story of Japanese treaty revision, so far as it is publicly known. But we have access to no private sources of information, and we are (but for that we thank God) no politician. Diplomacy is not a game of chance. It is a game of skill, like chess, at which the better player always wins. The Japanese negotiators, who, to be sure, had more at stake than their opponents, entirely overmatched them in brains. By playing a waiting game, by letting loose Japanese public opinion when convenient, and then representing it as a much more potent factor than it actually is, by skilful management of the press, by adroitly causing the chief seat of the negotiations to be shifted from Tōkyō, where some of the local diplomats possessed an adequate knowledge of the subject, to the European chanceries which