← catalogue

Problems of the Pacific

by Frank Fox · English · Gutenberg #40305 · 456,422 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Problems of the Pacific
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Problems of the Pacific

Author: Frank Fox


        
Release date: July 23, 2012 [eBook #40305]
                Most recently updated: October 23, 2024

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/40305

Credits: E-text prepared by Bruce Albrecht, Colin M. Kendall, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC ***

Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this
      file which includes the original map.
      See 40305-h.htm or 40305-h.zip:
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/40305/pg40305-images.html)
      or
      (https://www.gutenberg.org/files/40305/40305-h.zip)





PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC

by

FRANK FOX

Author of "Ramparts of Empire"







London
Williams & Norgate
14 Henrietta Street, Covent Garden
1912




CONTENTS


CHAP.                                                      PAGE

  1. THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE                                  1

  2. RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC                                   16

  3. THE RISE OF JAPAN                                       31

  4. CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA                  47

  5. THE UNITED STATES--AN IMPERIAL POWER                    66

  6. GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC                  85

  7. THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC                   100

  8. NEW ZEALAND AND THE SMALLER BRITISH PACIFIC COLONIES   120

  9. THE NATIVE RACES                                       136

 10. LATIN AMERICA                                          147

 11. CANADA AND THE PACIFIC                                 165

 12. THE NAVIES OF THE PACIFIC                              176

 13. THE ARMIES OF THE PACIFIC                              186

 14. TREATIES IN THE PACIFIC                                199

 15. THE PANAMA CANAL                                       216

 16. THE INDUSTRIAL POSITION IN THE PACIFIC                 228

 17. SOME STRATEGICAL CONSIDERATIONS                        245

 18. THE RIVALS                                             263

[Illustration]




PROBLEMS OF THE PACIFIC




CHAPTER I

THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE


The Pacific is the ocean of the future. As civilisation grows and
distances dwindle, man demands a larger and yet larger stage for the
fighting-out of the ambitions of races. The Mediterranean sufficed for
the settlement of the issues between the Turks and the Christians,
between the Romans and the Carthaginians, between the Greeks and the
Persians, and who knows what other remote and unrecorded struggles of
the older peoples of its littoral. Then the world became too great to be
kept in by the Pillars of Hercules, and Fleets--in the service alike of
peace and war--ranged over the Atlantic. The Mediterranean lost its
paramount importance, and dominance of the Atlantic became the test of
world supremacy.

Now greater issues and greater peoples demand an even greater stage. On
the bosom of the Pacific will be decided, in peace or in war, the next
great struggle of civilisation, which will give as its prize the
supremacy of the world. Shall it go to the White Race or the Yellow
Race? If to the White Race, will it be under the British Flag, or the
flag of the United States, or of some other nation? That is the problem
of the Pacific.

Since Cortes first looked on the waters of the ocean from a peak in
Darien, since Balboa of Castile waded into its waters and claimed them
for the dominion of the King of Castile, events have rushed forward with
bewildering haste to transfer the centre of the world's interest to the
Pacific. Cortes in his day looked to a North Pacific coast inhabited by
a few wandering Indians. (The powerful national organisation of Mexico
had not extended its influence as far as the Pacific coast.) Now there
stretch along that coast the Latin-American Power of Mexico, doomed,
probably, to be absorbed before the great issue of Pacific dominance is
decided, but having proved under Diaz some capacity for organisation;
the gigantic Power of the United States with the greatest resources of
wealth and material force ever possessed by a single nation of the
world; and the sturdy young Power of Canada.

To the South, Cortes looked to a collection of Indian States, of which
Peru was the chief, boasting a gracious but unwarlike civilisation,
doomed to utter destruction at the hands of Spain. Now that stretch of
Pacific littoral is held by a group of Latin-American nations, the
possibilities of which it is difficult accurately to forecast, but which
are in some measure formidable if Chili is accepted as a standard by
which to judge, though, on the whole, they have shown so far but little
capacity for effective national organisation.

Looking westward, Cortes in his day could see nothing but darkness. It
was surmised rather than known that there lay the Indies, the kingdoms
of the Cham of Tartary and the great Mogul, lands which showed on the
horizon of the imagination, half real, half like the fantasy of a
mirage. To-day the west coast of the Pacific is held by the European
Power of Russia; by the aspiring Asiatic Power of Japan, which within
half a century has forgotten the use of the bow and the fan in warfare
and hammered its way with modern weapons into the circle of the world's
great Powers; by China, stirring uneasily and grasping at the same
weapons which won greatness for Japan; by a far-flung advance guard of
the great Power of the United States in the Philippines, won
accidentally, held grimly; by England's lonely outposts, Australia and
New Zealand, where less than five millions of the British race hold a
territory almost as large as Europe.

Sprinkled over the surface of the ocean, between East and West, are
various fortresses or trading stations, defending interests or arousing
cupidities. Germany and France are represented. The United States holds
Hawaii, the key to the Pacific coast of North America, either for
offence or defence. Great Britain has Fiji and various islets. The
Japanese Power stretches down towards the Philippines with the recent
acquisition of Formosa.

Here are seen all the great actors in European rivalry. Added to them
are the new actors in world-politics, who represent the antagonism of
the Yellow Race to the White Race. Before all is dangled the greatest
temptation to ambition and cupidity. Who is master of the Pacific, who
has the control of its trade, the industrial leadership of its peoples,
the disposal of its warrior forces, will be master of the world.

It is a problem not only of navies and armies (though with our present
defective civilisation these are the most important factors): it is a
problem also of populations and their growth, of industries, of the
development of natural resources, of trade and commerce. The Pacific
littoral is in part unpeopled, in part undeveloped, unorganised,
unappropriated. Its Asiatic portion must change, it is changing, from a
position which may be compared with that of Japan fifty years ago to a
position such as Japan's to-day. Its American and Australian portion
must develop power and wealth surpassing that of Europe. Under whose
leadership will the change be made? To discuss that question is the
purpose of this book: and at the outset the lines on which the
discussion will proceed and the conclusions which seem to be inevitable
may be foreshadowed.

At one time Russia seemed destined to the hegemony of the Pacific. Yet
she was brought to the Pacific coast by accident rather than by design.
Her natural destiny was westward and southward rather than eastward,
though it was natural that she should slowly permeate the Siberian
region. As far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (the Elizabethan
epoch in Anglo-Saxon history), the curious celibate military
organisation of the Cossacks had won much of Siberia for the Czars. But
there was no dream then, nor at a very much later period, of penetration
to the Pacific.

European jealousy of Russia, a jealousy which is explainable only with
the reflection that vast size naturally fills with awe the human mind,
stopped her advance towards the Mediterranean. In the north her ports
were useless in winter. In the south she was refused a development of
her territory which was to her mind natural and just. Thus thwarted,
Russia groped in a blind way from the Siberian provinces which had been
won by the Cossacks towards a warm-water port in Asia. At first the
movement was southward and filled England with alarm as to the fate of
India. Then it turned eastward, and in Manchuria and Corea this European
Power seemed to find its destiny. But Japan was able to impose an
effective check upon Russian ambitions in the Far East. At the present
moment Russia has been supplanted in control of the Asiatic seaboard by
Japan.

Japan has everything but money to equip her for a bold bid for the
mastery of the Pacific before the completion of the Panama Canal. Europe
has taught to Japan, in addition to the material arts of warfare, a
cynical faith in the moral value, indeed, the necessity, of war to
national welfare. She considers that respect is only to be gained by
war: that war with a European nation is an enterprise of small risk:
that in short her experience with the Russian Fleet was fairly typical
of war with any European Power. She believes that she has the most
thoroughly efficient army and navy, considering their size, in the
world; and has much to justify the belief.

This ambition and the warlike confidence of Japan constitute to-day a
more important factor in the problem of the Pacific than her actual
fighting strength. But the check to prompt decisive action on her part
is that of poverty. Japan is very poor. The last war, in spite of great
gain of prestige, brought no gain of money. Its cost bled her veins
white, and there was no subsequent transfusion in the shape of a Russian
indemnity. Nor are the natural resources of Japan such as to hold out
much hope of a quick industrial prosperity. She has few minerals. Her
soil is in the bulk wretchedly poor. From the territories control of
which she has won in battle--Manchuria and Corea--she will reap some
advantage by steadily ignoring the "open door" obligation in trade, and
by dispossessing the native peasantry. But it cannot be very great.
There is no vast natural wealth to be exploited. The native peasantry
can be despoiled and evicted, but the booty is trifling and the cost of
the process not inconsiderable since even the Corean will shoot from his
last ditch.

Japan is now seeking desperately a material prosperity by industrial
expansion. A tariff and bounty system, the most rigid and scientific the
world knows, aims to make the country a great textile-weaving,
ship-building, iron-making country. The smallest scrap of an industry is
sedulously nurtured, and Japanese matches, Japanese soap, Japanese beer,
penetrate to the markets of the outer world as evidence of the ambition
of the people to be manufacturers. But when one explores down to
bedrock, the only real bases for industrial prosperity in Japan are a
supply of rather poor coal and a great volume of cheap labour. The
second is of some value in cheap production, but it is yet to be found
possible to build up national prosperity on the sole basis of cheap
labour. Further, with the growth of modernity in Japan, there is
naturally a labour movement. Doctrines of Socialism are finding
followers: strikes are heard of occasionally. The Japanese artisan and
coolie may not be content to slave unceasingly on wages which deny life
all comfort, to help a method of national aggrandisement the purport of
which they can hardly understand.

The position of Japan in the Pacific has to be considered, therefore, in
the light of the future rather than of the present. At the time of the
conclusion of the war with Russia it seemed supreme. Since then it has
steadily deteriorated. If she had succeeded in the realisation of her
ambition to undertake the direction of China's military and industrial
reorganisation, the Japanese Power would have been firmly established
for some generations at least. But the defects in her national character
prevented that. Inspiring no confidence among the Chinese, the Japanese
found all attempts at peaceful assumption of a controlling influence in
China checked by sullen antipathy; and a forced assumption would not
have been tolerated by Europe. It will not be found possible, on a full
survey of the facts, to credit Japan with the power to hold a supreme
place in the Pacific. She is, even now, among the dwindling Powers.

China, on the other hand, has the possibilities of a mighty future.
To-day she is in the throes of nation-birth. To-morrow she may unbind
her feet and prepare to join in the race for supremacy. The bringing of
China into the current of modern life will not be an easy task, but it
is clearly not an impossible one. Before the outbreak of the present
Revolution (which may place China among the democratic Republics of the
world), the people of the Celestial Empire had begun to reconsider
seriously their old attitude of intolerance towards European
civilisation. To understand fully the position of China it is necessary
to keep in mind the fact that the actual Chinese nation, some
400,000,000 of people, enervated as were the Peruvians of South America,
by a system of theocratic and pacific Socialism, were subjected about
250 years ago to the sovereignty of the Manchus, a warrior race from the
Steppes. Since then the Manchus have governed China, tyrannously,
incompetently, on the strength of a tradition of military superiority
stronger far than the _Raj_ by which the British have held India. But
the Manchus--in numbers and in intellect far inferior to the
Chinese--forgot in time their military enterprise and skill. The
tradition of it, however, remained until the events of the nineteenth
and twentieth centuries showed that the Manchu military power was
contemptible not only against the white foreigner, but also against the
Japanese _parvenu_. Patient China, finding her tyrant to be a weak
despot, revolts now, not only against the Manchu dynasty, but also
against the Conservatism which has kept her from emulating Japan's
success in the world.

At present the power of China in the Pacific is negligible. In the
future it may be the greatest single force in that ocean. Almost
certainly it may be reckoned to take the place of Japan as the chief
Asiatic factor.

Japan and China having been considered, the rest of Asia is negligible
as affecting the destiny of the Pacific except in so far as India can
serve as basis of action for British power. An independent Indian nation
is hardly one of the possibilities of the future. Religious, racial, and
caste distinctions make a united, independent India at present
impossible. Unless the British Power carries too far a tendency to
conciliate the talking tribes of the Hindoo peninsula at the expense of
the fighting tribes, it should hold India by right of a system of
government which is good though not perfect, and by reason of the
impossibility of suggesting any substitute. In the event of a failure of
the British Power, India would still, in all probability, fail to take a
place among the great nations of the earth. Either she would fall a
victim to some other nation or relapse into the condition, near to
anarchy, which was hers before the coming of the Europeans.

It is not possible to imagine to-day any European Power other than Great
Britain--with the possible exception of Russia--becoming strongly
established in the Pacific. France and Germany have footholds certainly.
But in neither case is the territory held by them possible of great
development, and in neither case is there a chain of strategic stations
to connect the Pacific colony with the Mother Country. The despatch of
the German "mailed fist" to Kiao-Chou in China some years ago is still
remembered as one of the comic rather than the serious episodes of
history. The squadron bearing to the Chinese the martial threat of the
German Emperor had to beg its way from one British coaling station to
another because of the lack of German ports.

The influence of South America in the Pacific need not yet be
calculated. It is a possible far-future factor in the problem; and the
completion of Trans-Andine railways may quickly enhance the importance
of Chili and Peru. But for the present South America can take no great
part in the Pacific struggle.

It is when British influence and American influence in the Pacific come
to be considered that the most important factors in the contest for its
supremacy enter upon the stage. Let us consider, for the nonce, the two
Powers separately.

The British Empire--holding Australia and New Zealand with an audacious
but thin garrison; having a long chain of strategic stations such as
Hong Kong and Singapore; having in India a powerful rear base for
supplies; holding a great part of the North-West Coast of America with a
population as yet scanty but beginning to develop on the same lines as
the Australasian people--is clearly well situated to win and to hold the
mastery of the Pacific. Such mastery would have to be inspired with
peaceful ideals; it could not survive as an aggressive force. It is
indeed the main strength of the British position in the Pacific that it
is naturally anxious, not for a disturbance but for a preservation of
the present state of things, which gives to the British Empire all that
a reasonable ambition could require. It is wise and easy to be peaceable
when one has all the best of the spoils.

For a secure British mastery of the Pacific, India would need to be held
with the military assistance of South Africa and Australia, and made a
great naval base; Australia and New Zealand would need to be populated
seriously; Canada would need to be guarded against absorption by the
United States and its new population kept as far as possible to the
British type; the friendship and co-operation of the United States would
need to be sought.

Turning next to the United States it will be recognised that she has in
a realised form all the force and wealth possible to an organised China
or a fully developed Australia. She has one hundred million people, who
have reached the highest stage of civilised organisation. Their material
wealth--and wealth counts for much in modern war--is almost
incalculable. Their national ambition has never been checked by defeat.
Lately it has been fed with foreign war and territorial conquest and it
has found the taste good. The American people face the future possessed
of all the material for a policy of aggressive Imperialism and with a
splendidly youthful faith in their own good motives, a faith which can
justify an action better than any degree of cynicism. There is as much
of the "old Adam" in them as in the peoples of any of the "effete
monarchies," and many circumstances seem to point to them as anxious to
take the lead among the White Races in the future.

As regards the Pacific, American ambition is clear. The United States
holds the Philippines at great expense of treasure and blood. She is
fortifying Honolulu, with the idea of making it a naval base "stronger
than Gibraltar."[1] She is cutting the Panama Canal and fortifying the
entrances with the probable purpose of giving to the United States a
monopoly of that gateway in time of war. With splendid audacity the
American despises secrecy in regard to his future plans. In New York
Naval Yard three years ago I was informed, with an amplitude of detail
that was convincing, of the United States' scheme for patrolling the
whole Pacific with her warships when the Canal had been finished.

Supposing, then, the United States to continue her present industrial
and commercial progress; supposing her to gradually tighten her hold on
the rest of the American continent; supposing her to overcome certain
centrifugal forces now at work, the problem of the Pacific, should the
United States decide to play a "lone hand," will be solved. It will
become an American lake, probably after a terrible struggle in which the
pretensions of the Yellow Races will be shattered, possibly after
another fratricidal struggle in which the British possessions in the
Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand, equally with Canada, will be forced
to obedience.

But is there any necessity to consider the United States and the British
Empire as playing mutually hostile parts in the Pacific? They have been
the best of friends there in the past. They have many good reasons to
remain friends in the future. A discussion as to whether the Pacific
Ocean is destined to be controlled by the American or by the British
Power could be reasonably ended with the query: Why not by an
Anglo-Celtic union representing both?

An Anglo-Celtic alliance embracing Great Britain, the United States and
the British Dominions, would settle in the best way the problem of the
Pacific. No possible combination, Asiatic, European, or Asia-European,
could threaten its position. But there are certain difficulties in the
way, which will be discussed later. For the present, it has only to be
insisted that both Powers are potential rather than actual masters of
the Pacific. Neither in the case of Great Britain nor of the United
States is a great Pacific force at the moment established. After her
treaty with Japan, Great Britain abandoned for a while the idea of
maintaining any serious naval strength in the Pacific. The warships she
maintained there, on the Australian station and elsewhere, had no
fighting value against modern armaments, and were kept in the Pacific as
a step towards the scrap-heap. That policy has since been reversed, and
the joint efforts of Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand directed
towards re-establishing British Pacific naval strength. At the
moment, however, the actual British naval force in the Pacific is
inconsiderable, if obsolete or obsolescent vessels are ruled out of
consideration. The United States also has no present naval force in the
Pacific that could contest the issue with even a fraction of the
Japanese navy. Clearly, too, she has no intention of attempting the
organisation of a powerful Pacific Fleet separate from her Atlantic
Fleet, but aims at the bolder policy of holding her interests in both
oceans by one great Fleet which will use the Panama Canal to mobilise at
an emergency in either.

If the resources of the present with their probable growth in the future
are taken into account, Great Britain and the United States will appear
as massing enormous naval and military forces in the Pacific. The
preponderance of naval force will be probably on the side of the United
States for very many years--since it is improbable that Great Britain
will ever be able to detach any great proportion of her Fleet from
European waters and her Pacific naval force will be comprised mainly of
levies from Australia and New Zealand, and possibly Canada, India, and
South Africa. The preponderance of military force will be probably on
the side of Great Britain, taking into count the citizen armies of
Australia and New Zealand (and possibly of Canada) and the great forces
available in India. Complete harmony between Great Britain and the
United States in the Pacific would thus give the hegemony of the ocean
to the Anglo-Saxon race. Rivalry between them might lead to another
result. In the natural course of events that "other result" might be
Asiatic dominion in one form or another.

These factors in Pacific rivalry will be discussed in detail in the
following chapters.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since the above was written it is reported that the United States
has taken possession of Palmyra Island--once a British possession--to
the south of Honolulu, obviously for strategic purposes.




CHAPTER II

RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC


Russia, for generations the victim of Asia, when at last she had won to
national greatness, was impelled by pressure from the West rather than
by a sense of requital to turn back the tide of invasion. That pressure
from the West was due to a misunderstanding in which Great Britain led
the way, and which the late Lord Salisbury happily described when he
stated that England "had backed the wrong horse" in opposing Russia and
in aiding Turkey against her.

Russia, because she broke Napoleon's career of victory by her power of
resistance, a power which was founded on a formlessness of national life
rather than a great military strength, was credited by Europe with a
fabulous might. Properly understood, the successful Russian resistance
to the greatest of modern captains was akin to that of an earthwork
which absorbs the sharpest blows of artillery and remains unmoved,
almost unharmed. But it was misinterpreted, and a mental conception
formed of the Russian earthwork as a mobile, aggressive force eager to
move forward and to overwhelm Europe. Russia's feat of beating back the
tide of Napoleonic invasion was merely the triumph of a low biological
type of national organism. Yet it inspired Europe with a mighty fear.
The "Colossus of the North" came into being to haunt every Chancellery.

Nowhere was the fear felt more acutely than in Great Britain. It is a
necessary consequence of the British Imperial expansion of the past, an
expansion that came about very often in spite of the Mother Country's
reluctance and even hostility, that Great Britain must now always view
with distrust, with suspicion, that country which is the greatest of the
European Continental Powers for the time being, whether it be France,
Russia, or Germany. If British foreign policy is examined carefully it
will be found to have been based on that guiding principle for many
generations. Whatever nation appears to aim at a supreme position in
Europe must be confronted by Great Britain.

Sometimes British statesmen, following instinctively a course which was
set for them by force of circumstances, have not recognised the real
reason of their actions. They have imagined that there was some ethical
warrant for the desire for a European "balance of power." They have seen
in the malignant disposition of whatever nation was the greatest Power
in Europe for the time being a just prompting to arrange restraining
coalitions, to wage crippling wars. But the truth is that the British
race, with so much that is desirable of the earth under its flag, with
indeed almost all the good empty lands in its keeping, must be jealous
of the next European Power. On the other hand, every growing Power in
Europe must look with envy on the rich claim which one prospector, and
that one not the earliest, has pegged out in the open fields of the
world. Thus between Great Britain and the next European Power in rank
there is always a mutual jealousy. The growing Power is credited with a
desire to seize the rich lands of the British Empire; and generally has
the desire. The holding Power is apprehensive of every step forward of
any rival, seeing in it a threat to her Empire's security. There is such
a thing in this world as being too rich to be comfortable. That is Great
Britain's national position.

Thus when the power of France was broken and Napoleon was safely shut up
in St Helena, the British nation, relieved of one dread, promptly found
another. Russia was credited with designs on India. She was supposed to
be moving south towards the Mediterranean, and her object in seeking to
be established there was obviously to challenge British naval supremacy,
and to capture British overseas colonies. British diplomacy devoted
itself sternly to the task of checkmating Russia. Russia, the big
blundering amorphous nation, to whom England had given, some generations
before, early promptings to national organisation, and who now sprawled
clumsily across Europe groping for a way out of her ice-chains towards
a warm-water port, became the traditional enemy of the British Empire.

This idea of Russian rivalry grew to be an obsession. The melodramas of
the British people had for their favourite topic the odious cruelty of
Russian tyranny. If a submarine cable to a British colony were
interrupted, or a quarry explosion startled the air, the colonists at
once turned their thoughts to a Russian invasion, and mobilised their
volunteers. Colonists of this generation can remember the thrills of
early childhood, when more than once they "prepared for the Russians,"
and the whole force of some hundreds of volunteers and cadets determined
to sell their lives dearly on the battlefield to keep Russian knouts
from the backs of their womenfolk, it being seriously considered that
the Russian always celebrated a victory by a general knouting.

Not until the idea of Russia establishing a hegemony over Europe had
been dissipated by the Russo-Japanese War did British statesmanship
really discover qualities of good neighbourliness in the Russian. But by
that time the main direction of Russian expansion had been definitely
settled as eastward instead of southward. Perhaps this was to the
ultimate advantage of civilisation, even though the decision left the
Hellenic peninsula in the grip of the Turk, for it pushed the buffer
territory between Europe and Asia far forward into Asia. Should an
Asiatic Power, with revived militancy, ever seek again the conquest of
Europe, as Asiatic Powers have done before this, the war must commence
in Manchuria, and not on the plains below the Ural Mountains.

The position which Russia has occupied as a buffer state between Asia
and Europe has kept her back in the ranks of the army of civilisation.
Not only has she had to suffer the first of the savage blows which Asian
hordes have from time to time aimed at Europe, but also she has had to
endure Asiatic additions to her population, reducing the standard of her
race.

The instinct against race-mixture which Nature has implanted in man is
the great safeguard of the work of evolution to a higher type. The White
Race, having developed on certain lines to a position which promises, if
it does not fulfil, the evolution of a yet higher type, has an
instinctive repugnance to mixing its blood with peoples in other stages
of evolution. It is this instinct, this transcendental instinct, which
is responsible for the objection to miscegenation in the United States,
and for the lynchings by which that objection is impressed upon the
negro mind. The same instinct is at the back of the "White Australia"
laws, forbidding coloured people any right of entry into Australia.

It is not difficult to argue from a point of view of Christian religion
and humanity against an instinct which finds its extreme, but yet its
logical, expression in the burning of some negro offender at the stake.
But all the arguments in the world will not prevail against Nature. Once
a type has won a step up it must be jealous and "selfish," and even
brutal in its scorn of lower types; or must climb down again. This may
not be good ethics, but it is Nature. Russian backwardness in
civilisation to-day is a living proof that the scorn of the coloured man
is a necessary condition of the progress of the White Man's
civilisation.

But the race-mixture which was of evil to Russia has been of benefit to
the rest of Europe. To borrow a metaphor from modern preventive
medicine, the Russian marches between Europe and Asia have had their
power of resistance to Yellow invasion strengthened by the infusion of
some Yellow blood.

A land of high steppes, very cold in winter, very hot in summer, and of
great forests, which were difficult to traverse except where the rivers
had cut highways, Russia was never so tempting to the early European
civilisations as to lead to her area being definitely occupied and held
as a province. Neither Greek nor Roman attempted much colonisation in
Russia. By general consent the country was left to be a No-Man's-Land
between Asia and Europe. Alexander, whose army penetrated through to
India and actually brought back news of the existence of Australia,
never marched far north into the interior of Russia. There the mixed
tribes of Finns, Aryans, Semites, Mongols held a great gloomy country
influenced little by civilisation, but often temporarily submerged by
waves of barbarians from the Asiatic steppes. Still Western Europe in
time made some little impression on the Russian mass. Byzantine culture
impressed its mark on the Southern Slavs; Roman culture, after filtering
through Germany, reached the Lithuanians of the north. In the twelfth
century we hear of Arabian caravans making their way as far as the
Baltic in search of amber.

But more important to the Russian civilisation was the advent of the
Normans in the ninth century. They consolidated White Russia during the
ninth to the thirteenth centuries, appeared as warriors before the walls
of Byzantium, and learned the Christian faith from the priests of the
Eastern communion. (Russia has since been faithful always to the Greek
Church.) That period was rich in national heroes, such as Rurik, Simeon
and Truvor, and definitely set the current of Russian national life
towards a place in the European family of nations. By the thirteenth
century the White Russians, with their capital established at Moscow,
were able to withstand for a while a new Mongol invasion. But they could
not prevent Gengis Khan's lieutenants establishing themselves on the
lower Volga, and the Grand Prince of Moscow had to be content to become
a suzerain of the Grand Khan of Tartary.

For three centuries Russia now, amid many troubles, prepared herself to
take a place amongst European Powers. She was still more or less subject
to the Asiatic. But she was not Asiatic, and her vast area stood between
Europe and Asia and allowed the more Western nations to grow up free
from interference from any Eastern people, except in the case of the
great invasion of the Turks coming up from the south-east. How great was
the service that Russia unconsciously did to civilisation during those
centuries! If the Tartar had come with the Turk, or had followed him,
the White Races and their civilisation might have been swept away.

After being the bulwark of Europe for centuries Russia at last found her
strength and became the avenger of the White Races. By the sixteenth
century the Russian power had been consolidated under the Muscovite
Czars, and a great nation, of which the governing class was altogether
European, began to push back the Asiatic. From the sixteenth to the
nineteenth centuries the Russian Power grew. The natural direction of
expansion was southward. The new nation wanted a place in the sun, and
looked longingly towards the Mediterranean. Only the Turk stood in the
path, and for the Russian Czars war with the Turk had something of a
religious attraction. It was the Cross against the Crescent. It was the
champion of the Greek Church winning back the Byzantine Empire to
Christian domination.

For Russia to march south, driving the infidel from Europe, freeing the
Greeks, establishing herself in Constantinople, winning warm-water ports
and warm-climate fields, seemed to the Russian mind a national policy
which served both God and Mammon. That it served God was no slight thing
to the Russian people. They, then as now, cherished a simplicity and a
strenuousness of faith which may be called "superstitious" or
"beautiful and childlike" as the observer may wish, but which is
undoubtedly sincere. "There has been only one Christian," wrote Heine.
If he had known the Russians he would have qualified the gibe. They have
a real faith, and it is an important factor in the making of their
national policy which has to be taken into account.

How much there was of religious impulse and how much of mere
materialistic national ambition in Russia's move southward did not in
the least concern other European Powers. Whatever its motive they
considered the development dangerous. It threatened to give the Russian
an overwhelming power, a paramountcy in Europe, and that could not be
tolerated even if it had the most worthy of motives. Above all, Great
Britain was alarmed. In the days of Elizabeth Great Britain had been a
very good friend to Russia. But Russia was then no possible rival either
on land or on the high seas. In the days of Victoria the position had
changed. Russia still wore the laurels of her "victories" over Napoleon.
She was credited with being the greatest military Power in the world,
and credited also with a relentless and Machiavellian diplomacy that
added vastly to the material resources of her armies and fleets.

The Crimean War, with its resulting humiliating restrictions on Russian
power in the Black Sea, taught Russia that Europe was determined to
block her path south and preferred to buttress Turkish misrule than to
permit Russian expansion. Baffled but still restless, Russia turned
east and marched steadily towards the Pacific, with a side glance at the
Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean, which caused Great Britain fresh
apprehension as to the fate of India.

The progress of the Russian Power in Asia throughout the nineteenth
century and its sudden check at the dawn of the twentieth century make
one of the most dramatic chapters of the world's history. European
rivalry had followed Russia on her march across Siberia, and the British
Power in particular was alarmed to see the "Colossus of the North" with
a naval base in the Pacific. Alarm was deepened when, after reaching the
waters of the Pacific, Russia turned south, again eager for a warm-water
port. At the time China seemed to be on the verge of dissolution as a
national entity, and it seemed as though Russia were destined to win a
great Asiatic Empire beside which even India would be a poor prize. In
1885 Great Britain nearly went to war with Russia in the defence of the
integrity of Corea.

But the decisive check to Russia was to come from another source. The
time had arrived for Asia to reassert some of her old warlike might. The
island power of Japan, having shaken off the cumbrous and useless armour
of medievalism, set herself sturdily in the path of modern progress and
aspired to a place among the great nations of the earth. Japan saw
clearly that Russia was the immediate enemy and prepared for a decisive
war, with an uncanny determinedness and a scrupulous attention to every
detail. Vast military and naval armaments had to be prepared. The
necessary money had to be wrung from a bitterly poor population or
borrowed at usurious rates. The political art with which that was done
was not the least wonderful part of a great national achievement.
Then--the weapons of war forged--it seemed good to Japanese
statesmanship to flesh them on an easy victim. It fell to China's lot to
teach the Japanese confidence in their new warlike arts, and to pay in
the shape of an indemnity something towards the cost of the great
struggle which Japan contemplated.

Had Russia had that relentless and Machiavellian diplomacy with which
she used to be credited, she would never have permitted the Japanese
attack upon China. Constituting herself the champion of China, she would
at one stroke have pushed back the growing power of Japan and
established a claim to some suzerainty over the Celestial Empire. In
carrying out her plans Japan had to take this chance, of Russia coming
on top of her when she attacked China. She took the chance and won.
Russia would have had to take the chance of a great European upheaval if
she had interfered in the Japo-Chinese struggle. She did not take the
chance, and allowed her rival to arm at China's expense to meet her.

The Chinese war finished, Japan, equipped with a full war-chest, a
veteran army and navy, was now ready to meet Russia. But she was faced
by the difficulty that in meeting Russia she might also have to meet a
European coalition, or the almost equally dangerous eventuality of a
veto on the war on the part of the United States. Japan was convinced of
her ability to fight Russia single-handed. Probably she would, in the
last event, have decided to take the risks of any coalition and enter
upon the war, since she had to fight Russia or perish as an expanding
Power. But she determined in the first instance to attempt to obtain a
safeguarding alliance.

There are indications that Japan had in the first instance thoughts of
the United States, of Germany and of Great Britain, as alternative
allies. She thought of the United States because of her great financial
strength, her appreciable naval power in the Pacific, and her likely
value in keeping Great Britain out of the ring: of Germany because of
her military power on the Russian frontier; of Great Britain because of
her overwhelming naval power. Some held that Great Britain was only
approached in the second place. Whether that were so or not, the British
Power proved favourable.

Japan was lucky in the moment of her approach. It had become obvious at
that time to British statesmanship that the old ideal of "splendid
isolation" was no longer tenable. The British Empire needed alliances,
or at least safeguarding understandings with other nations. But it
almost seemed as though the knowledge had come too late. Apparently
there were no European friendships offering. Japan thus found Great
Britain in a somewhat anxious mood, and an alliance was concluded
between the Power which had hitherto followed a policy of splendid
isolation and the _parvenu_ Power of the Far East. Japan was now all
ready, and Russia was doomed to be ousted from her position as a great
Power in the Pacific.

A great deal of nonsense has been written and accepted as true
concerning the war between Japan and Russia. Throughout the course of
that war the Japanese took the best of care to put their own view of the
case before the world. The "wonderful heroism," "the marvellous
strategical and tactical skill," "the perfect medical and transport
arrangements" of the Japanese forces received something more than their
fair share of praise, because of the intelligent and perspicuous
industry of the Japanese publicity agencies. The Japanese conducted a
fine campaign. Their generals and admirals followed the best models in
their dispositions. Both in the movements and in the sanitary regulation
of the troops, the commanders were much helped by the habit of
discipline of a nation inured to yield blind obedience to a god-born
ruler. Still there was no inspired genius for war shown by the Japanese.
Their movements were copied from the books. A well-led White army of
much less strength would, I believe, have driven them ultimately from
Corea into the sea. Their seeming want of power of original thought and
their reliance on routine made their movements slow and flabby. They won
by the inferiority of the enemy rather than by a great genius for
warfare.

The Russians on their side fought under the dispiriting conditions of
having a well-trained enemy in front and a revolution behind. The heart
of the nation was not with them, and the Russian autocracy was hampered
at every turn by the internal disorders of European Russia. It seems
probable that the autocracy hoped to solve in part a double problem by
the mischievous ingenuity of drafting as many as possible of the
discontented at home to the war abroad. That helped things in Russia,
but added to the difficulties of the generals in Manchuria. Withal, the
Russians put up a good fight. The early engagements were but rearguard
actions, the Japanese having an enormous superiority of force, and the
Russians striving to delay rather than to arrest their advance. It was
not until Mukden that the single line of railway to Russia had brought
General Kouropatkin a fair equality of force: and he had to contend then
with the tradition of retreat which had been perforce established in his
army, and with the growing paralysis of his home government confronted
by a great revolutionary movement. Even so, Mukden was a defeat and not
a rout.

It is necessary to keep in mind these facts in order to arrive at a
sound conclusion as to the future position of Russia in the Pacific. It
is not safe to rule her out of the reckoning altogether. A second war,
waged by a united Russia against Japan, would probably have a far
different result, and would drive Japan off the Asiatic mainland were
the ring to be kept clear. For the present, however, Russia is a Power
with a great territory washed by the Pacific Ocean, but with no decisive
voice in its destinies.




CHAPTER III

THE RISE OF JAPAN


The misfortune of success has never been better exemplified in the
world's history than in the results which have followed from the White
Man's attempt to arouse Japan to an appreciation of the blessings of
European civilisation. Our fathers and grandfathers of the middle
nineteenth century battered at the barred and picturesque doors of the
land of the Mikado with a vague idea that there was plunder, trade or
some other tangible benefit to be got from dragging the quaint Yellow
Recluse out of his retirement. Without a foreboding, every civilised
Power that had a fighting ship and the time to spare, took some part in
urging Japan to awake and be modern. A great deal of gunpowder was
burned before the little Asiatic nation stirred. Then she seemed in a
flash to learn the whole lesson of our combative civilisation. Naval
strategy; the forging of trade-marks; military organisation;
appreciation of the value of cheap labour and of machinery in industry;
aseptic surgery; resolute and cunning diplomacy--all these were suddenly
added to the mental equipment of an Asiatic people, and all used in
reprisal against Europe. To-day Japan is the greatest warrior Power in
the Pacific, and is also a powerful factor in that war for markets which
is not the least important manifestation of race rivalry. As sailors,
soldiers, merchants and factory hands, the Japanese are unmistakably
awake.

With a discipline impossible of achievement by a European race, the
Japanese people pursued the methods of eclectic philosophy in their
nation-making. They copied the best from the army systems of Germany and
France: duplicated the British naval discipline: adopted what they
thought most efficient of the industrial machinery of Europe and
America, including a scientific tariff. Nothing that seemed likely to be
of advantage was neglected. Even the question of religion was seriously
considered, and these awakened people were at one time on the point of a
simultaneous national adoption of some form of Christianity. But they
were convinced on reflection that nothing of Europe's success in this
world was due to religion; and, unconcerned for the moment with anything
that was not of this world, decided to forbear from "scrapping"
Shintoism and sending it to the rubbish heap where reposed the
two-handled sword of the Sumarai.[10]

This miracle of the complete transformation of a race has been
accomplished in half a century. Within the memory of some living people
the Japanese were content with a secluded life on their hungry islands,
where they painted dainty pictures, wove quaint and beautiful fabrics,
cultivated children and flowers in a spirit of happy artistry, and
pursued war among themselves as a sport, with enthusiasm certainly, but
without any excessive cruelty, if consideration be given to Asiatic
ideas of death and the Asiatic degree of sensitiveness to torture. They
were without any ideas of foreign conquest. The world had no respect for
Japan then. Specimens of Japanese painting and pottery were admired by a
few connoisseurs in little corners of the world (such as Bond Street,
London), and that was all. Now, Japan having learned the art of modern
warfare, we know also that the Japanese are great artists, great
philosophers, great poets. Of a sudden a nation has jumped from being
naturally chosen as the most absurd and harmless vehicle for a Gilbert
satire to that of being "the honoured ally" of Great Britain, in respect
to whose susceptibilities that satire should be suppressed.

But our belated respect for the artistry of the Japanese gives little,
if any, explanation of the miracle of their sudden transformation. The
Chinese are greater artists, greater philosophers, superior
intellectually and physically. They heard at an even earlier date the
same harsh summons from Europe to wake up. But it was neglected, and,
whatever the outcome of the revolutionary movement now progressing, the
Chinese are not yet a Power to be taken into present consideration as
regards the Pacific Ocean or world-politics generally. The most patient
search gives no certain guidance as to the causes of Japan's sudden
advance to a position amongst the world's great nations. If we could
accurately determine those causes it would probably give a valuable clue
to the study of the psychology of races. But the effort is in vain. An
analogy is often drawn between the Japanese and the British. Except that
both were island races, there are few points of resemblance. The British
islands, inhabited originally by the Gauls, had their human stock
enriched from time to time by the Romans, the Danes, the Teutons, the
Normans. The British type, in part Celtic, in part Roman, in part
Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon, in part Norman, was naturally a
hard-fighting, stubborn, adventurous race fitted for the work of
exploration and colonisation.

But the Japanese had, so far as can be ascertained, little advantage
from cross-breeding. Probably they were originally a Tartar race. The
primitive inhabitants of the islands were ancestors of the Hairy Ainus,
who still survive in small numbers. Like the aboriginals of Australia,
the Ainus were a primitive rather than a degraded type, closely allied
to the ancestors of the European races. Probably the Tartar invaders who
colonised Japan came by way of Corea. But after their advent there was
no new element introduced to give the human race in Japan a fresh
stimulus; and that original Tartar stock, though vigorous and warlike,
has never proved elsewhere any great capacity for organisation.

In the sixth century of the Christian Era, Chinese civilisation and the
Buddhistic religion came to the Japanese, who at the time had about the
same standard of culture as the Red Indians of the American continent
when the _Mayflower_ sailed. For some four centuries the Japanese island
race was tributary to China, and during that time there was evolved a
national religion, Shintoism, which probably represented the old Tartar
faith modified by Chinese philosophy. In the eighth and subsequent
centuries, Japan in its national organisation very closely resembled
feudal Europe. As in Europe, there was a service tenure for the land; a
system by which organised groups, or KO's, became answerable
collectively for the deeds of each member of the group; and, as in
feudal Europe, Church and State made rival claims to supreme power.

Indiscriminate fighting between rival feudal lords, a constant strife
between the Shoguns, representing the priestly power, and the Mikados,
representing the civil power, make up the islands' history for century
after century. Through it all there is no gleam of light on the
evolution of the latent powers which were to come to maturity, as in an
hour, during the nineteenth century. Japan appeared to be an average
example of a semi-civilised country which would never evolve to a much
higher state because of the undisciplined quarrelsomeness of its people.

In the sixteenth century Europe first made the acquaintance of Japan.
Italian, Portuguese, Dutch, Spanish, British traders and explorers
visited the country. St Francis Xavier established missions there and
baptized many in the Christian faith. After two centuries of general
toleration, with intervals of welcome and yet other intervals of
resolute massacre, in 1741 the last of the Europeans were ordered out of
the islands, the Japanese having decided that they wanted neither the
religion, the trade, nor the friendship of the White Man. The same
prohibitions were applied at the same time to Chinese traders. A
resolute policy of exclusiveness was adopted.

Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact
with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of
rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious
warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft,
flourished a dainty æstheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on
Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of
her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her
scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of
grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more
unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation,
organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial
warfare.

The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White
civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was
rude; and it was followed by resolute offers of "friendship," backed by
armed threats, from Great Britain, France, Russia and Portugal. The
Japanese wanted none of them. The feeling of the people was distinctly
anti-foreign. They wished to be left to their flowers and their family
feuds. But the White Man insisted. In 1864 a combination of Powers
forced the Straits of Shimonoseki. The Japanese were compelled by these
and other outrages to a feeling of national unity. In the face of a
foreign danger domestic feuds were forgotten. By 1869 Japan had
organised her policy on a basis which has kept internal peace ever since
(with the exception of the revolt of the Satsuma in 1884), and she had
resolved on fighting out with Russia the issue of supremacy in the
Pacific. Within a quarter of a century the new nation had established
herself as a Power by the sensational defeat, on land and sea, of China.
The Peace of Shimonoseki extended her territory to Formosa and the
Pescadores, and filled her treasury with the great war indemnity of
£57,000,000. She then won, too, a footing on the Asiatic mainland, but
was for the time being cheated of that by the interference of Europe, an
interference which was not repeated when, later, having defeated Russia
in war and having won an alliance with Great Britain, she finally
annexed Corea.

From the Peace of Shimonoseki in 1895 the progress of Japan has been
marvellous. In 1900 she appeared as one of the civilised Powers which
invaded China with a view to impress upon that Empire the duty a
semi-civilised Power owed to the world of maintaining internal order. In
1902 she entered into a defensive and offensive alliance with Great
Britain, by which she was guaranteed a ring clear from interference on
the part of a European combination in the struggle with Russia which she
contemplated. The treaty was a triumph of diplomatic wisdom. Appearing
to get little, Japan in real truth got all that her circumstances
required. A treaty binding Great Britain to come to her aid in any war
would have been hopeless to ask for, and not very useful when obtained,
for the Japanese attack on Russia might then have been the signal for a
general European war in which possibly a European combination would have
crippled Great Britain and then turned its united attention to the
destruction of Japan's nascent power. A treaty which kept the ring clear
for a single-handed struggle with Russia was better than that risk. In
return Japan gave nothing in effect except a pledge to make war on her
own immediate enemy, Russia, for the assistance of Great Britain if
necessity arose.

The conditions created by the Anglo-Japanese treaty of 1902 developed
naturally to the Battle of Mukden, the culminating point of a campaign
in which for the first time for many years the Yellow Race vanquished
the White Race in war. That Battle of Mukden not only established
Japan's position in the world. It made the warlike awakening of China
inevitable, and restored to the daylight again the long-hidden yet
always existing arrogance of Asia. Asia has ever nurtured an insolence
beside which any White Race pride is insignificant. That fact is made
patent during recurring epochs of history. The Persian Darius sent to
the Greeks for earth and water, symbols to acknowledge that "Persia
ruled the land and the oceans." The Huns later looked upon the White Men
whom they conquered as something lower than animals. The Turks, another
great Asiatic race to war against Europe, could compare the White Man
only to that unclean beast, the dog. The first European ambassadors who
went to China were forced to crawl with abject humility to the feet of
the Chinese dignitaries. In his secret heart--of which the European mind
knows so little--the Asiatic, whether he be Japanese, Chinese, or
Indian, holds a deep disdain for the White. The contempt we feel for
them is returned more than one hundredfold.

Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore
an event of history more important than any since the fall of
Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been
unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having
believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an
Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream; more than
half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most
serious foe to Christian Europe, was sealed. From 1711 to 1905,
whatever questions of supremacy arose among the different European
Powers, there was never any doubt as to the superiority of the European
race over all coloured races. The White Man moved from one easy conquest
to another. In Asia, India, China, Persia and Japan were in turn
humbled. Africa was made the slave-farm of the White Race.

Now in the twentieth century at Mukden the White Race supremacy was
again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was
thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not
stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the
Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the
invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably
it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were
many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which
brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the
Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic; and which
has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the
beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gaining the
mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the
Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their
territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among
rival White nations could be agreed upon.

Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to
recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part
she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful
growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a
peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of
indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the
positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has
since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain
suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by
resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure
after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from
her people.

If the present position of affairs could be accepted as permanent, there
would be no "problem of the Pacific." That ocean would be Japan's
home-water. Holding her rugged islands with a veteran army and navy; so
established on the mainland of Asia as to be able to make a flank
movement on China; she is the one "Power in being" of the Pacific
littoral. But as already stated, the verdict of the war with Russia
cannot be taken as final. And soon the United States will come into the
Pacific with overwhelming force on the completion of the Panama
Canal--an event which is already foreshadowed in a modification of the
Anglo-Japanese treaty to relieve Great Britain of the possible
responsibility of going to war with America on behalf of Japan. The
permanence of the Japanese position as the chief Power of the Pacific
cannot therefore be presumed. The very suddenness with which her
greatness has been won is in itself a prompting to the suspicion that it
will not last. It has been a mushroom growth, and there are many
indications that the forcing process by which a Power has been so
quickly raised has exhausted the culture bed. In the character of her
population Japan is in some respects exceedingly rich. The events of the
past few years have shown them to possess great qualities of heroism,
patience and discipline. But they have yet to prove that they possess
powers of initiative, without which they must fail ultimately in
competition with peoples who make one conquest over Nature a
stepping-stone to another. And it is not wholly a matter of race
prejudice that makes many observers view with suspicion the "staying
power" of the character of a nation which thinks so differently from the
average European in matters of sex, in commercial honesty, and in the
obligations of good faith. Many of those who have travelled in the East,
or have done business with Japan, profess a doubt that an enduring
greatness can be built upon a national character which runs contrary in
most matters to our accepted ideas of ethics. They profess to see in the
present greatness of achievement marking Japanese national life a "flash
in the pan"--the astonishing precocity and quickness of progress of that
type of doomed infant which quickly flowers and quickly fades in the
European slums and which is known as "The Mongol" to medical science
because of a facial peculiarity which identifies it infallibly. "The
Mongol" of European child-life comes to an astonishingly early maturity
of brain: its smartness is marvellous. But it is destined always to an
early end from an ineradicable internal weakness which is, in some
strange way, the cause of its precocious cleverness.

Whether the Japanese cleverness and progressiveness will last or not,
the nation has to be credited with them now as a live asset. But apart
from the national character the nation possesses little of "natural
capital." There is practically no store of precious metals; a poor
supply of the useful minerals; small area of good land; and the local
fisheries have been exploited with such energy for many generations that
they cannot possibly be expanded in productivity now. The statesmen of
New Japan have certainly won some overseas Empire as an addition to the
resources available for a sound fabric of national greatness. But what
has been won is quite insufficient to weigh in the scale against the
"natural capital" of almost any of Japan's rivals in the Pacific.

For want of territory to colonise under her own flag, Japan has lost
many subjects to alien flags. Japanese settlements of some strength
exist on the Pacific coast of America, in the Hawaiian Islands, and in
parts of China. There is little doubt that Japanese policy has hoped
that in some cases at least her flag would follow her nationals. Talk,
not all of it quite irresponsible, has credited Japan with definite
designs on many Pacific settlements, especially the Hawaiian Group where
her nationals to-day outnumber any other single element of the
population. But there are now no islands or territories without a
protecting flag. Even when, as was said to be the case with Mexico and
another Latin-American country, a weak and friendly nation seems to
offer the chance of annexation of territory following a peaceable
penetration, there is the power of the United States to interpose a
veto. Japan thus cannot add to her natural resources without a war; and
she has not, it would seem, sufficient natural resources to back up a
war with the enemies she would have to meet now in the Pacific.

If she were to put aside dreams of conquest and Empire, has Japan a
sound future in the Pacific as a thriving minor manufacturing and
trading power? I must say that it seems to me doubtful. The nation has
drunk of the wine of life and could hardly settle down to a humdrum
existence. No peaceable policy could allow of a great prosperity, for
the reasons of natural poverty already stated. It would be a life of
drudgery without the present dream of glory. To study the Japanese
emigrant away from his own country is to understand that he has not the
patience for such a life. In British Columbia, in California, in Hawaii,
the same conclusion is come to by European fellow-residents, that the
Japanese worker is arrogant, unruly, unreliable. In Japan itself there
are signs that the industrial population will not tolerate for ever a
life of very poor living and very hard working if there is not a
definite and immediate benefit of national glory promised.

The position of Japan in the Pacific seems to me, then, that she cannot
reasonably expect to win in a struggle for its mastery: and yet that she
will inevitably be forced to enter into that struggle. A recent report
in a Tokio paper stated: "At a secret session of the Budget Commission
on February 3, Baron Saito, Minister of Marine, declared that the
irreducible minimum of naval expansion was eight battleships of the
super-Dreadnought class, and eight armoured cruisers of the same class,
which must be completed by 1920, construction being begun in 1913. The
cost is estimated at £35,000,000." And the paper (_Asahi Shimbun_) went
on to hint at the United States as the Power which had to be confronted.
That is only one of very many indications of Japanese national feeling.
She has gone too far on the path to greatness to be able to retire
safely into obscurity. She must "see it through." Feats of strength far
nearer to the miraculous than those which marked her astonishing victory
over Russia would be necessary to give Japan the slightest chance of
success in the next struggle for the hegemony of the Pacific.

FOOTNOTES:

[10] Since writing the above, the Japanese Government has revived in a
modified form the proposal for a State adoption, in part at least, of
the Christian religion. A communication to the Japanese Press on 20th
January 1912 from the Minister for Home Affairs stated:--"In order to
bring about an affiliation of the three religions, it is necessary to
connect religion with the State more closely, so as to give it
(religion) added dignity, and thus impress upon the public the necessity
of attaching greater importance to religious matters. The culture of
national ethics can be perfected by education combined with religion. At
present moral doctrines are inculcated by education alone, but it is
impossible to inculcate firmly fair and upright ideas in the minds of
the nation unless the people are brought into touch with the fundamental
conception known as God, Buddha, or Heaven, as taught in the religions.
It is necessary, therefore, that education and religion should go hand
in hand to build up the basis of the national ethics, and it is,
therefore, desirable that a scheme should be devised to bring education
and religion into closer relations to enable them to promote the
national welfare. All religions agree in their fundamental principles,
but the present-day conceptions of morals differ according to the time
and place and according to the different points of view. It is ever
evolving. It may, therefore, be necessary for Shintoism and Buddhism to
carry their steps towards Western countries. Christianity ought also to
step out of the narrow circle within which it is confined, and endeavour
to adapt itself to the national sentiments and customs, and to conform
to the national polity in order to ensure greater achievements. Japan
has adopted a progressive policy in politics and economics in order to
share in the blessings of Western civilisation. It is desirable to bring
Western thought and faith into harmonious relationship with Japanese
thought and faith in the spiritual world."

This proposal to change in one act the religion of a nation "to ensure
greater achievements" will perhaps do something to support the
contention, which will be put forward later, that a nation which takes
such a curious view of life is not capable of a real and lasting
greatness, however wonderful may be its feats of imitation.




CHAPTER IV

CHINA AND THE TEEMING MILLIONS OF ASIA


China is potentially the greatest Power on the western littoral of the
Pacific. Her enormous territory has vast agricultural and mineral
resources. Great rivers give easy access to some of the best of her
lands. A huge population has gifts of patient labour and craftsmanship
that make the Chinaman a feared competitor by every White worker in the
world. In courage he is not inferior to the Japanese, as General Gordon
found. In intelligence, in fidelity and in that common sense which
teaches "honesty to be the best policy," the Chinaman is far superior to
the Japanese.

The Chinaman has been outstripped up to the present by the Japanese in
the acquirement of the arts of Western civilisation, not because of his
inferior mind, but because of his deeper disdain. He has stood aside
from the race for world supremacy on modern lines, not as one who is too
exhausted for effort, but as one who is too experienced to try. China
has in the past experimented with many of the vaunted ideas and methods
of the new civilisation, from gunpowder to a peerage chosen by
competitive examination, and long ago came to the conclusion that all
was vanity and vexation of spirit.

The Chinaman is not humble; not content to take an inferior place in the
world. He has all the arrogance of Asia. The name of "Heavenly Kingdom"
given to the land by its inhabitants, the grandiose titles assumed by
its rulers, the degrading ceremonies which used to be exacted from
foreigners visiting China as confessions of their inferiority to the
Celestial race, show an extravagant pride of birth. In the thirteenth
century, when Confucian China, alike with Christian Europe, had to fear
the growing power of the fanatical Mohammedans, a treaty of alliance was
suggested between France and China: and the negotiations were broken off
because of the claim of China that France should submit to her as a
vassal, by way of preliminary. The Chinaman's idea of his own importance
has not abated since then. His attitude towards the "foreign devils" is
still one of utter contempt. But at present that contempt has not the
backing of naval and military strength, and so in practice counts for
nothing.

China cherishes the oldest of living civilisations. Her legendary
history dates back to 2404 B.C., her actual history to 875 B.C., when a
high state of mental culture had been reached, and a very advanced
material civilisation also; though some caution is necessary in
accepting the statements that at that time China made use of gunpowder,
of the mariner's compass, and of printing type. But certainly weaving,
pottery, metal-working, and pictorial art flourished. The noble height
to which philosophy had reached centuries before the Christian Era is
shown by the records of Confucianism and Taoism. Political science had
been also cultivated, and there were then Chinese Socialists to claim
that "everyone should sow and reap his own harvest."

There seem to have been at least two great parent races of the present
population of the Chinese Empire--a race dwelling in the valleys and
turning its thoughts to peace and the arts, and a race dwelling on the
Steppes and seeking joy in war. It was the Tartar and Mongol tribes of
the Steppes which sent wave after wave of attack westward towards
Europe, under chiefs the greatest of whom was Gengis Khan. But it was
the race of the valleys, the typical Chinese, stolid, patient,
laborious, who established ultimate supremacy in the nation, gradually
absorbing the more unruly elements and producing modern China with its
contempt for military glory. But the Mongols by their wars left a deep
impression on the Middle Ages, founding kingdoms which were tributary to
China, in Persia, Turkestan and as far west as the Russian Volga.

The earliest record of European relations with China was in the seventh
century, when the Emperor Theodosius sent an embassy to the Chinese
Emperor. In the thirteenth century Marco Polo visited the Court of the
Grand Khan at Pekin, and for a while fairly constant communication
between Europe and China seems to have been maintained, the route
followed being by caravan across Asia. Christian missionaries settled in
China, and in 1248 there is a record of the Pope and the Grand Khan
exchanging greetings.

When towards the end of the fourteenth century the Ming dynasty
supplanted the Mongol dynasty, communication with Europe was broken off
for more than a century. But in 1581 Jesuit missionaries again entered
China, and the Manchu dynasty of the seventeenth century at first
protected the Christian faith and seemed somewhat to favour Western
ideas. But in the next century the Christian missions were persecuted
and almost extirpated, to be revived in 1846. Since that date "the
mailed fist" of Europe has exacted from the Chinese a forced tolerance
of European trade and missions.

But Chinese prejudice against foreign intrusion was given no reason for
abatement by the conduct of the European Powers, as shown, for example,
in the Opium War of 1840. That prejudice, smouldering for long, broke
out in the savage fanaticism of the Boxer outbreak of 1900, which led to
a joint punitive expedition by the European Powers, in conjunction with
Japan. China had the mortification then of being scourged not only by
the "white devils" but also by an upstart Yellow Man, who was her near
and her despised neighbour. All China that knew of the expedition to
Pekin of 1900 and understood its significance, seems to have resolved
then on some change of national policy involving the acceptance of
European methods, in warfare at least. Responding to the stimulus of
Japan's flaunting of her success in acquiring the ways of the European,
China began to consider whether there was not after all something useful
to be learned from the Western barbarians. The older Asiatic country has
a deep contempt for the younger: but proof of Japan's superior position
in the world's estimation had become too convincing to be disregarded.
China saw Japan treated with respect, herself with contumely. She found
herself humiliated in war and in diplomacy by the upstart relative. The
reason was plain, the conclusion equally plain. China began to arm and
lay the foundations of a modern naval and military system. The national
spirit began to show, too, in industry. Chinese capital claimed its
right and its duty to develop the resources of China.

Early in the twentieth century "modern ideas" had so far established
themselves in China that Grand Councillor Chang Chih-tung was able,
without the step being equivalent to suicide, to memorialise the Throne
with these suggestions for reform:--

1. That the Government supply funds for free education.

2. That the Army and Navy be reorganised without delay.

3. That able and competent officials be secured for Government services.

4. That Princes of the blood be sent abroad to study.

5. That arsenals for manufacturing arms, ammunition, and other weapons
of war, and docks and shipbuilding yards for constructing warships, be
established without delay.

6. That only Chinese capital be invested in railway and mining enterprises.

7. That a date be given for the granting of a Constitution.

Chang Chih-tung may be taken as the representative of the new school of
Chinese thought. His book _Chuen Hsueh Pien_ (China's Only Hope) is the
Bible of the moderate reformers. He states in that book:--

"In order to render China powerful, and at the same time preserve our
own institutions, it is absolutely necessary that we should utilise
Western knowledge. But unless Chinese learning is made the basis of
education, and a Chinese direction given to thought, the strong will
become anarchists, and the weak slaves. Thus the latter end will be
worse than the former.... Travel abroad for one year is more profitable
than study at home for five years. It has been well said that seeing is
a hundred times better than hearing. One year's study in a foreign
institution is better than three years in a Chinese. Mencius remarks
that a man can learn foreign things best abroad; but much more benefit
can be derived from travel by older and experienced men than by the
young, and high mandarins can learn more than petty officials.... Cannot
China follow the _viam mediam_, and learn a lesson from Japan? As the
case stands to-day, study by travel can be better done in that country
than in Europe, for the following reasons.... If it were deemed
advisable, some students could afterwards be sent to Europe for a fuller
course."

After the Russian-Japanese War Chinese students went to Japan in
thousands, and these students laid the foundation of the Republican
school of reformers which is the greatest of the forces striving for
mastery in China to-day. The flow of students to Japan was soon checked
by the then Chinese Government, for the reason that Republican
sentiments seemed to be absorbed in the atmosphere of Japan, despite the
absolutism of the Government there. In the United States and in Europe
the Chinese scholar was able, however, to absorb Western knowledge
without acquiring Republican opinions! There is some suggestion of a
grim jest on the part of the Chinese in holding to this view. It recalls
Boccaccio's story of the Christian who despaired of the conversion of
his Jewish friend when he knew that he contemplated a visit to Rome. The
Chinese seemed to argue that a safe precaution against acquiring
Republican views is to live in a Republican country. Chinese confidence
in the educational advantages offered by the United States has been
justified by results. American-educated Chinese are prominent in every
phase of the Reform movement in China, except Republican agitation. The
first Reform Foreign Minister in China, the first great native Chinese
railway builder, the first Chinese women doctors, the greatest native
Chinese banker, are examples of American training.

It would be outside the scope of this work to attempt to deal in any way
exhaustively with the present position in China. What the ultimate
outcome will be, it is impossible to forecast. At present a Republic is
in process of formation, after the baby Emperor through the Dowager
Empress had promulgated an edict stating:

"We, the Emperor, have respectfully received the following Edict from
her Majesty the Dowager:

"In consequence of the uprising of the Republican Army, to which the
people in the Provinces have responded, the Empire seethed liked a
boiling cauldron, and the people were plunged in misery. Yuan Shih-kai,
therefore, commanded the despatch of Commissioners to confer with the
Republicans with a view to a National Assembly deciding the form of
government. Months elapsed without any settlement being reached. It is
now evident that the majority of the people favour a Republic, and, from
the preference of the people's hearts, the will of Heaven is
discernible. How could we oppose the desires of millions for the glory
of one family? Therefore, the Dowager Empress and the Emperor hereby
vest the sovereignty in the people. Let Yuan Shih-kai organise with
full powers a provisional Republican Government, and let him confer with
the Republicans on the methods of establishing a union which shall
assure the peace of the Empire, and of forming a great Republic, uniting
Manchus, Chinese, Mongols, Mohammedans, and Tibetans."

But all men whom I have met who have had chances of studying Chinese
conditions at first hand, agree that the Chinese national character is
not favourable to the permanent acceptance of Republican ideas. If there
is one thing which seems fixed in the Chinese character it is
ancestor-worship, and that is essentially incompatible with
Republicanism.[3] But what seems absolutely certain is that a new China
is coming to birth. Slowly the great mass is being leavened with a new
spirit.

Now a new China, armed with modern weapons, would be a terrible engine
of war. A new China organised to take the field in modern industry would
be a formidable rival in neutral markets to any existing nation. The
power of such a new China put at the disposal of Japan could at least
secure all Asia for the Asiatics and hold the dominant position in the
Northern Pacific. Possibly it could establish a world supremacy, unless
such a Yellow union forced White Races to disregard smaller issues and
unite against a common foe. Fortunately a Chinese-Japanese alliance is
not at present in the least likely. The Chinese hatred of the Japanese
is of long standing and resolute, though it is sometimes dissembled. The
Japanese have an ill-concealed contempt for the Chinese. Conflict is
more likely than alliance between the two kindred races.

Further, the Chinese will probably move far more slowly on any path of
aggression than did the Japanese, for they are intensely pacific. For
many generations they have been taught to regard the soldier as
contemptible, the recluse scholar as admirable. Ideas of overseas Empire
on their part are tempered by the fanatic wish of every Chinaman that
his bones should rest in his native land. It will only be in response to
enormous pressure that China will undertake a policy of adventure.

That pressure is now being engendered from within and without. From
without it is being engendered by insolent robberies of territory and
other outrages on the part of foreign Powers. More particularly of late
has the modern arrogance of Japan impressed upon the old-fashioned
arrogance of China the fact that the grave scholar, skilled in all the
lore of Confucius, is a worthless atom beside a drilled coolie who can
shoot straight. From within the pressure is being engendered by the
great growth of population. For some time past infanticide has been
common in China as a Malthusian check. Now European missionaries seek to
discourage that. European medicine further sets itself to teach the
Yellow Man to cope with plague, smallpox, and cholera, while European
engineering abates the terrors of flood and of crop failure.

Machiavelli would have found prompting for some grim aphorism in this
curious eagerness of Europe to teach the teeming millions of Asia to rid
themselves of checks on their greater growth, and thus to increase the
pressure of the Asiatic surplus seeking an outlet at the expense of
Europe. It is in respect to the urgent demand for room for an
overcrowding population that there exists alike to China and Japan the
strongest stimulus to warlike action in the Pacific. China in particular
wants colonies, even if they be only such colonies as provide
opportunities for her coolies to amass enough wealth to return in old
age to China. From the fertile basin of China there have been overflow
waves of humanity ever since there has been any record of history.
Before the era of White settlement in the Pacific the Chinese population
had pushed down the coast of Asia and penetrated through a great part of
the Malay Archipelago, an expansion not without its difficulties, for
the fierce Malay objected to the patient Chinaman and often the Chinaman
remained to fertilise but not to colonise the alien soil. By some
Providential chance neither the Chinaman nor the Japanese ever reached
to Australia in the early days of the Pacific, though there are records
of Japanese fishermen getting as far as the Hawaiian Group, a much more
hazardous journey. If the Asiatics had reached Australia the great
island would doubtless have become the southern province of Asia, for
its native population could have offered no resistance to the feeblest
invader.

In the past, however, the great natural checks kept the Asiatic
populations within some limits. Internal wars, famines, pestilences,
infanticide--all claimed their toll. Nature exercised on man the checks
which exist throughout the whole animal kingdom, and which in some
regions of biology are so stern that it is said that only one adult
survives of 5,000,000 spawn of a kind of oyster. Now European influence
is steadily directed in Asia to removing all obstacles to the growth of
population. When the Asiatics wish to fight among themselves Europe is
inclined to interfere (as at the time of the Boxer outbreak in China),
on the ground that a state of disorder cannot be tolerated. In India
internecine warfare is strictly prohibited by the paramount Power. In
Japan all local feuds have been healed by pressure from Europe and
America, and the fighting power of the people concentrated for external
warfare.

Not alone by checking internal warfare does Europe insist on encouraging
the growth of the Asiatic myriads. European science suggests railways,
which make famine less terrible; flood prevention works which save
millions of lives. European moralists make war on such customs as the
suicide of young widows and the exposure for death of female children.
But, far more efficacious than all, European scientists come forward to
teach to the Asiatics aseptic surgery, inoculation, and the rest of the
wisdom of preventive and curative medicine. Sometimes Nature is stronger
than science. The Plague, for instance, still claims its millions. But
even the Plague diminishes before modern medical science.

In his _Health and Empire_ (1911), Dr Francis Fremantle tells of the
campaign against plague in India. He writes:

"The death-rate from plague in 1904 in the Lahore and Amritsar districts
in which I worked was 25 per 1000. Over 1,000,000 Indians died of plague
in 1904, over 1,000,000 in 1905; in 1906, 332,000, and it was thought
the end was in sight. But 640,000 died in the first four months of 1907;
in 1908, 321,000 died; in 1909 only 175,000, but in 1910 again very
nearly 500,000, and this year more than ever. The United Provinces had
barely been reached by the epidemic in 1904; now with a population equal
to that of the United Kingdom, they have been losing 20,000 every week;
and the Punjab 34,000 in one week, 39,000, 47,000, 54,000, 60,000 and so
on--over 430,000 in the first four months of this year in a population
of 25,000,000. Imagine Great Britain and Ireland losing the same
proportion--over 1,000,000 from plague in half a year. And India as a
whole has in fifteen years lost over 7,000,000 from plague. Why wonder
at her unrest?

"What, then, can the Government do? Extermination of rats is impossible;
disinfection on a large scale is impracticable; evacuation of villages
cannot be done voluntarily on any universal scale; the Government will
not apply compulsion, and such evacuation is quite useless without a
rigid cordon of police or military that will prevent communication
between one infected village and others not yet infected. A cordon, it
has been proved over and over again, cannot be maintained; the native
who wishes to pass it has only to present some official with a cautious
rupee. Extermination of rats in an Asiatic country has often failed; but
here is without a shadow of doubt the key to the problem. The methods
formerly adopted had been to give a capitation grant for every rat
brought to the appointed place, and before long it was found, for
instance in Bombay, that an extensive trade had grown up in the breeding
of rats, whereby, at a few annas apiece from the Government, many
families were able to sustain a comfortable existence.... But since
sentence on the rat-flea has been pronounced for the murder of 7,000,000
persons and over, the best method for his extermination will not be far
off.

"It is often debated whether even half-measures are worth being
continued. Professor W. J. Simpson, in his exhaustive monograph on the
plague, and in 1907 in his _Croonian Lectures_, has shown how in history
epidemics of plague have come and gone in different countries with long
intervals between them, often of one hundred and thirty to one hundred
and fifty years. In the eighteenth century, for instance, India seems to
have been almost free of the plague, but early in the seventeenth
century it suffered severely. The present epidemic is assuming, as far
as we can trust previous records, unprecedented proportions; probably
after a few years it will die out again.

"An occasional cynic may argue that, since we have saved so many
thousands of lives annually from famine and wars, it may be just as well
to let the plague take their place. To such a pessimistic and inhuman
conclusion it is impossible for one moment to submit. It may be that for
economic reasons some parts of the Indian Empire would be happier if
their population were less dense; but it does not follow that we should
allow Death to stalk uninterrupted, unopposed, and apparently without
limit, throughout the country. Economics apart, we may yet be absolutely
convinced, whether as doctors or as statesmen, that it is our mission,
our duty, to protect the populations included under British rule to the
best of our ability against every scourge as it may arise; and therefore
it is urgent that such measures as we have be pushed forward with the
utmost vigour."

That tells (in a more convincing way, because of the impatience of the
doctor, accustomed to European conditions, at the slow result of work in
India) how resolute is the White Man's campaign against the Yellow Man's
death-rate in one part of Asia. Such a campaign in time must succeed in
destroying the disease against which it is directed and thus adding
further to the fecundity of Asia.

Nor is the fight against diseases confined to those parts of Asia under
direct White rule. The cult of White medicine spreads everywhere,
carried by Japanese as well as by European doctors and missionaries. Its
effects already show in the enormous increase of Asiatic population,
proved wherever definite figures are available. That growth adds year by
year to the danger that the Yellow Man will overrun the Pacific and
force the White Man to a second place in the ocean's affairs, perhaps
not even leaving him that.

An older and sterner school of thought would have condemned as fatuous
the White Races' humanitarian nurture of the Yellow Races. But the
gentler thought of to-day will probably agree with Dr Fremantle that the
White Man cannot "allow Death to stalk uninterrupted, unopposed" even
through the territory of our racial rivals. But we must give serious
thought to the position which is thus created, especially in view of the
"levelling" racial tendency of modern weapons of warfare. China has a
population to-day, according to Chinese estimates, of 433,000,000;
according to an American diplomatist's conclusions, of not much more
than half that total. But it is, without a doubt, growing as it never
grew before; and modern reform ideas will continue to make it grow and
render the menace of its overflow more imminent.

At present the trend of thought in China is pacific. But it is not
possible to be sure that there will not be a change in that regard with
the ferment of new ideas. The discussion to-day of a Republic in China,
of womanhood suffrage in China, of democratic socialism in China,
suggests that the vast Empire, which has been for so long the example of
conservative immobility most favoured by rhetoricians anxious to
illustrate a political argument, may plunge into unexpected adventures.
China has in the past provided great invaders of the world's peace. She
may in the near future turn again to the thoughts of military adventure.
The chance of this would be increased if in the settlement of her
constitutional troubles a long resort to arms were necessary. Then the
victorious army, whether monarchical or Republican, might aspire to win
for a new China recognition abroad.

It is a fortunate fact that supposing a revival of militancy in China, a
revival which is possible but not probable, the first brunt of the
trouble would probably fall upon Japan. At the present moment Japan is
the most serious offender against China's national pride. As the
conqueror of Corea and the occupier of Manchuria, she trespasses most of
all foreign Powers on the territories and the rights of China. After
Japan, Russia would have to expect a demand for a reckoning; Great
Britain would come third and might come into collision with an
aggressive China, either because of the existence of such settlements as
Hong Kong or because of the Thibetan boundary. A China in search of
enemies, however, would find no lack of good pretexts for quarrelling.
There are, for instance, the offensive and humiliating restrictions on
Chinese immigration of the United States, of Canada, New Zealand and
Australia.

I find it necessary, however, to conclude that so far as the near
future is concerned, China will not take a great warrior part in the
determining of Pacific issues. She may be able to enforce a more
wholesome respect for her territorial integrity: she may push away some
intruders: she may even insist on a less injurious and contemptuous
attitude towards her nationals abroad. But she will not, I think, seek
greatness by a policy of aggression. There is no analogy between her
conditions and those of Japan at the time of the Japanese acceptance of
European arts and crafts. Japan at the time was a bitterly quarrelsome
country: she turned from civil to foreign war. China has been
essentially pacific for some centuries. Japan was faced at the outset of
her national career with the fact that she had to expand her territory
or else she could not hope to exist as a great Power. China has within
her own borders all that is necessary for national greatness.

If at a later date the Chinese, either from a too-thorough study of the
lore of European civilisation, or from the pressure of a population
deprived of all Malthusian checks and thus finding an outlet absolutely
necessary, should decide to put armies and navies to work for the
obtaining of new territory, the peril will be great to the White Man.
Such a Chinese movement could secure Asia for the Asiatics, and might
not stop at that point. But that danger is not of this decade, though
it may have to be faced later by the White Power which wins the
supremacy of the Pacific.

FOOTNOTES:

[3] A very clear statement as to the position in China was that given in
London during January of 1912 by Mr Kwei Chih, a secretary of the
Chinese Legation.

"None of the dynasties in China," he said, "has ever maintained a
tyrannical _régime_ for any length of time, least of all the Manchu
dynasty, the policy of which has consisted rather of a mixture of
paternalism and obscurantism than of hard repression of the people....
The present unanimous desire of the Chinese to remove the Manchu dynasty
arises solely from the fact that the Chinese have fully awakened to the
realisation that only a policy of thoroughgoing Westernisation can save
China from disruption and partition. The removal of the Manchu dynasty
is of no greater national moment to China than would be the fall of a
Cabinet to any European country. Personal animus enters, indeed, so
little into the determination of the new Chinese _régime_ that the
question of setting apart lands for the deposed dynasty, and even of
granting it ex-territorial privileges, may eventually be accepted in the
way of a solution. In regard to the adoption of Republican ideas, it may
be said that the Chinese statesman does not understand the meaning of
the Republican principle, and if a new _régime_ should declare itself
Republican, its Republicanism will be of a much more strongly democratic
type than any known to Europe. It will even be more popular in its
constitution than the American, and will far more fully seek the
development of the common weal than most bureaucratic systems bearing
the name. The suggested application of Christian principles to the new
_régime_ may be regarded as wholly impossible. Confucianism, by which
China stands or falls, is a secular philosophy, the only semblance of a
spiritual or religious tenet in which is the principle of
ancestor-worship, and though a theocratic idea is admitted in the
creation of the universe, the question of a life hereafter is wholly
excluded from its teachings."




CHAPTER V

THE UNITED STATES--AN IMPERIAL POWER


Following the map of the North-Western Pacific littoral, the eye
encounters, on leaving the coast of China, the Philippine Islands, proof
of the ambition of the United States to hold a place in the Pacific.

It is a common fallacy to ascribe to the United States a Quakerish
temperament in foreign affairs. Certain catch-words of American local
politics have been given a fictitious value, both at home and abroad.
"Republican Simplicity," "The Rights of Man," "European Tyranny,"
"Imperial Aggression," "The Vortex of Militarism"--from these and
similar texts some United State publicists are wont to preach of the
tyranny of European kings and emperors; of their greed to swallow up
weak neighbours; and of the evils of the military and naval systems
maintained to gratify such greed. By much grandiose assertion, or by
that quiet implication which is more complete proof of a convinced mind
than the most grandiose of assertion, the American nation has been
pictured in happy contrast to others, pursuing a simple and peaceful
life; with no desire for more territory; no wish to interfere with the
affairs of others; in the world, but not of the world.

Astonishment that such professions should carry any weight at all in the
face of the great mass of facts showing that the American national
temper is exactly the reverse of Quakerish, is modified in the political
student by the fact that it is the rule for nations as well as
individuals to be judged in the popular estimation by phrases rather
than by facts. Ignoring the phrases of politicians and considering only
the facts, it will be found that the American people have Imperial
ambitions worthy of their ancestry and inseparable from the
responsibility towards civilisation which their national greatness
involves.

It was in the middle of the eighteenth century that the United States
began national housekeeping within a small territory on the seaboard of
the Atlantic. By the nineteenth century that area had extended over a
section of the continent of America as large almost as Europe. By the
twentieth century this Power, still represented as incurably "peaceful
and stay-at-home" by its leaders, was established in the Caribbean Sea,
on the Isthmus of Panama, in the North and South Pacific, along the
coast of Asia, and had set up firmly the principle that whatever affair
of the world demanded international attention, from a loan to China, to
the fate of an Atlantic port of Morocco, the United States had
"interests" which must be considered, and advice which must be
regarded. The only circumstance that genuinely suggests a Quaker spirit
in United States foreign diplomacy is her quaint directness of language.
More effete peoples may wrap every stage of a negotiation up to an
ultimatum in honeyed phrases of respect. America "tutoyers" all courts
and is mercilessly blunt in claim and warning.

It would be very strange if the United States were otherwise than
Imperial in spirit. Nations, like individuals, are affected by
biological laws; a young, strong nation is as naturally aggressive and
ambitious as a young, strong boy. Contentment with things as they are, a
disposition to make anxious sacrifices to the gods who grant peace, are
the signs of old age. If a boy is quite good his parents have a
reasonable right to suspect some constitutional weakness. A new nation
which really resembled what a great many of the American people think
the United States to be, would show as a morbid anomaly. No; the course
of the world's future history will never be correctly forecasted except
on the assumption that the United States is an aggressively Imperial
nation, having an influence at least equal to that of any European Power
in the settlement of international issues; and determined to use that
influence and to extend its scope year by year. In the Problem of the
Pacific particularly, the United States must be counted, not merely as a
great factor but the greatest factor.

If the American citizen of to-day is considered as though he were a
British citizen of some generations back, with a healthy young appetite
for conquest still uncloyed, some idea near to the truth will have been
reached. But since the deference exacted by public opinion nowadays
compels some degree of pretence and does not permit us to parade our
souls naked, it is improbable that the United States citizen of this
century will adopt the frank freebooting attitude of the Elizabethan
Englishman when he was laying the foundations of his Empire by methods
inspired somewhat by piracy as well as by patriotism. The American will
have to make some concession to the times and seek always a moral
sanction for the extension of his boundaries. Such a search, however, is
rarely made in vain when it is backed by a resolved purpose. It was
sufficient for Francis Drake to know that a settlement was Spanish and
rich. The attack followed. The United States needs to know that a
possession is foreign, is desirable, and is grossly ill-governed before
she will move to a remonstrance in the sacred name of Liberty. Since
good government is an ideal which seldom comes at all close to
realisation, and the reputation of no form of administration can survive
the ordeal of resolute foreign criticism, the practical difference is
slight. The American Empire will grow with the benediction always of a
high moral purpose; but it will grow.

It is interesting to recall the fact that at its very birth the United
States was invested by a writer of prophetic insight with the purple of
Empire. Said the _London Gazette_ of 1765:--"Little doubt can be
entertained that America will in time be the greatest and most
prosperous Empire that perhaps the world has ever seen." But the early
founders of the new nation, then as now, deceived themselves and others
with the view that a pacific little Republic, not a mighty Empire, was
their aim. The Imperial instinct showed, however, in the fact that the
baby nation had in its youngest days set up a formidable navy. It was
ostensibly "for the local defence of its shores," but naval power and
overseas Empire are inseparably linked.

The austere Republic began to grow in territory and influence at a rate
putting to shame the early feats of the Roman power. By 1893 the United
States had made it clear that she would not allow her independence to be
fettered in the slightest degree by any claims of gratitude from France:
and her Declaration of Neutrality in the European War then raging was a
clear statement of claim to be considered as a Power. The war with the
Barbary States in 1802 to suppress piracy was a claim to police rights
on the high seas, police rights which custom gives only to a paramount
sea Power. By the next year Spain and France had been more or less
politely relieved of all responsibilities in North America, and the
United States stretched from ocean to ocean, and from the Great Lakes to
the Gulf of Mexico.

It is upon the early eloquence of her founders as to the duty of the
United States to confine her attention strictly to America, that the
common misconception of America's place in foreign policy has been built
up. That talk, however, was in the first instance dictated largely by
prudence. Alexander Hamilton, who controlled the foreign policy of the
infant Republic at the outset, was particularly anxious that she should
find her feet before attempting any deeds of enterprise. In particular,
he was anxious that the United States should not, through considerations
of sentiment, be drawn into the position of a mere appanage of France.
He set the foundations of what was known afterwards as the "Monroe
doctrine," with the one thought that, at the time, a policy of
non-interference with European affairs was a necessary condition of free
growth for the young nation. The same idea governed Washington's
farewell address in 1796 with its warning against "foreign
entanglements."

Afterwards the "Monroe doctrine"--deriving its name from a message by
President Monroe in 1823--was given the meaning that the United States
would not tolerate any interference with the affairs of the American
continent by Europe. Finally the "Monroe doctrine," which had begun with
an affirmation of America's non-participation in European affairs, and
had developed into a declaration against European interference with
American affairs, took its present form, which is, in effect, that over
all America the United States has a paramount interest which must not be
questioned, and that as regards the rest of the world she claims an
equal voice with other Powers. Yet, though that is the actual position,
there is still an idea in some minds that the Monroe doctrine is an
instrument of humbleness by which the United States claims the immunity
of America from foreign interference and guarantees foreign countries
from American interference.

It will be of value to recall, in illustration of the rapid growth of an
aggressive national pride in the United States, the circumstances which
led up to Mr. President Monroe's formal message in 1823. The dawn of the
nineteenth century found the young American nation, after about a
quarter of a century's existence, fairly on her feet; able to vindicate
her rights abroad by a war against the Barbary pirates: given by the
cession of Louisiana from France, a magnificent accession of territory.
The Empire of Spain was crumbling to pieces, and between 1803 and 1825
the Latin-American Republics in South and Central America were being
established on the ruins of that Empire. Spain, her attention engaged in
European wars, was able to do little or nothing to assert herself
against the rebellious colonies. But in 1815, Napoleon having been
vanquished, the Holy Alliance in Europe attempted to reassert the old
power of the European monarchies. The terror of Napoleon's army had
forced the kings of the earth into a union which forgot national
differences and was anxious only to preserve the Divine Right of Kings.
The formation of this Holy Alliance was viewed with suspicion and
dislike in the United States, and when in 1823 the Alliance raised the
question of joint action by European monarchies to restore Spanish rule
in South America, the United States responded with Monroe's famous
message forbidding any European interference on the continent of
America. Such European colonies as already existed would be tolerated,
and that was all. The message stated:

    "The American continents by the free and independent conditions
    which they have assumed are henceforth not to be considered as
    subjects for future colonisation by any European Power.

    "We could not view any interposition for purpose of oppressing them
    or controlling in any other manner their destiny by any European
    Power in any other way than as the manifestation of an unfriendly
    disposition towards the United States."

That "Monroe doctrine" was destined to be extended greatly in scope. In
1845 Mr. President Polk declared that no future European colony should
be planted on any part of the North American continent, and laid it down
as the duty of the United States "to annex American territory lest it be
annexed by European countries." True to that faith, he was responsible
for the annexation of Texas, Oregon and California. The United States
claim to overlordship of North America was still more remarkably
extended in 1867, when a protest was entered against the Federation of
the Canadian Provinces. The protest was not insisted upon then, though
in 1870 Mr. President Grant revived the spirit of the protest with his
forecast of "the end of European political connection with this
continent." The Venezuela controversy between Great Britain and the
United States in 1895 was responsible for another extension of the
Monroe doctrine. It was then claimed that "foreign colonies ought to
cease in this hemisphere." Insistence on that would, however, have led
to a war in which Great Britain probably would have had the assistance
of other European Powers affected; and the Monroe doctrine receded a
little.

Exactly how this chief article of the United States foreign policy
stands to-day one cannot say. Certainly the Monroe doctrine does not
mean, as it was once supposed to mean, that the United States in return
for foreign abstention from interference in American affairs pledges
herself to keep apart from all extra-American affairs. In world politics
she claims and exercises the privileges to which her vast resources and
her high state of civilisation are the warrants. In regard to American
affairs the Monroe doctrine clearly forbids any further European
colonisation in North or South America, and constitutes the United
States as the Suzerain Power of all the Latin-American Republics
(whether they are willing or not). What else it will be found to mean
will depend on the circumstances of the moment and the feelings of the
newspaper proprietors who exercise so great an influence on the
American man-in-the-street, the governing factor in shaping his
country's foreign policy. In European countries, however democratic, the
man-in-the-street has rarely any immediate authority over Foreign
Affairs. In Great Britain, for example, the questions of the relations
of the Government with other countries are not canvassed before the
voters. The close oligarchy of the Cabinet (acting often with the
Opposition Front Bench) comes to decisions of peace and war, of treaty
and _entente_, and, after decision, allows Parliament and the electorate
to acquiesce. But in the United States foreign policy is actually
dictated by the voters; and that means, in effect, by the newspapers. On
occasion the Monroe doctrine has already been interpreted into a notice
to quit to all European Powers holding settlements on the American
continent. It may in the near future revive that claim to paramount and
exclusive authority, and it may cover a declaration of direct suzerainty
over Mexico, and over the smaller republics intervening between the
United States border and the Panama Canal. In most Latin-American
republics disorder is the rule rather than the exception; and it may
become at any moment the honest opinion of the man-in-the-street of the
United States that the Panama Canal is too important to civilisation to
be left to the chances of interference from less stable governments than
his own.

These conclusions are inevitable to anyone making any study of American
history and the American character. They are not hostile criticisms.
They are rather appreciations. A great nation with a belief in its
destiny must be "Imperialist" in spirit, because it has a natural desire
to spread the blessings of its rule. The people of the United States
believe as strongly in themselves as did the ancient Hebrews, and all
must have a genuine respect for that fierce spirit of elect nationality
which made the Hebrews found a great nation on a goat-patch. In
Elizabethan England the same spirit flourished and was responsible for
the founding of the British Empire. (It survives still in the British
Isles, though somewhat spasmodically.) There is no ground at all either
for wonder or for complaint in the fact that Imperialism has been born
to vigorous life in the United States, where the people of "God's own
country" are firm in these two articles of faith: that any interference
in the affairs of the United States is unjust, unnecessary, tyrannical
and impious; that any United States interference with another nation is
a necessary and salutary effort on behalf of civilisation. Let no man of
British blood complain. But let no one in making calculations of world
policy be deceived into any other conclusion than that the United States
is the great Imperial force of this century, and also the one Power that
has enough of the splendid illusions of youth to indulge in crusading
wars, for which Europe nowadays is too old and cautious.

In the countries of Europe other than Great Britain that which I have
stated is coming to be generally recognised, and if at any time a
combination could be proposed with any hope of success "to put America
in her place," the combination would be formed and the Old World would
grapple with the New to try conclusions. Without Great Britain, however,
such an alliance would have at present no chance of success, and British
adherence is not within the realm of practical thought to-day.

The Imperialist tendency of United States policy is shown with
particular clarity in the history of the Pacific Ocean. Very early in
her life the vigorous young nation saw the Fates beckoning her across
the Pacific. The downfall of the Spanish power in North America left the
United States heir to a great stretch of rich coast line, including the
noble province of California. Russia was ousted from the north-west
coast of the Continent by a wise purchase. Before then, American whalers
sailing out of Boston had begun to exploit the Southern Pacific. Their
whaling trips brought back knowledge of the Hawaiian or Sandwich Group,
and, following exactly the methods of British colonisation, American
missionaries were the pioneers of American nationalisation. As far back
as 1820 Hiram Bingham preached his first sermon at Honolulu from the
text, "Fear not, for, behold, I bring you glad tidings of great joy." A
handsome church now marks the gratitude of his native converts. With
equal justice Bingham's American compatriots might have set up a great
statue to him as the first warden of the Marches of the Pacific for the
United States. For from that day the annexation of Hawaii was
inevitable. The process took the familiar course. First the United
States Republic exercised a benevolent suzerainty over the Hawaiian
kingdom. Then the blessing of free institutions was bestowed on the
natives by the foundation of an Hawaiian Republic. The next step was
definite annexation. Following that, came steps for the formation of a
great naval base at Honolulu.

When I visited the Hawaiian Group in the spring of 1909 the work of
fortifying Honolulu was being pushed on with great vigour, and the
American military and civil authorities boasted of their intention to
make it the Gibraltar of the Pacific. The city of Honolulu has at
present a very small harbour, a little bay to which access is given by
an opening in the coral reefs which surround the island. This port would
hardly afford shelter to a squadron of cruisers. But to the left as one
enters is Pearl Harbour, a magnificent stretch of land-locked water
sufficient to float a great Fleet. But Pearl Harbour basin in its
natural state is too well protected, there being no means of access
except for very small boats. American energy is now remedying that, and
a deep-water channel is being cut from Honolulu Harbour to Pearl Harbour
to take vessels of the largest draught at all tides. When that channel
is completed, Pearl Harbour will be at once commodious and easily
protected. The single narrow entrance will be dominated by the guns of
Malakiki Hill, a great eminence, somewhat like Gibraltar in shape, to
the right of the town, which commands the sea-front east and west: and
within Pearl Harbour the American Pacific Fleet will find a safe haven.
It will be absolutely impregnable from the sea. Hostile ships
approaching Honolulu would have to steer straight for Malakiki and then
defile amid the coral reefs past its guns before the entrance to Pearl
Harbour would open before them.

But land defence has also to be taken into account. The chief male
element of the Hawaiian population is not American, not native Hawaiian.
It is Japanese. The Mikado's subjects represent now the largest fighting
element in the population, outnumbering even the natives. These
Japanese, imported as coolies for the sugar-fields, are mostly men of
military training. Further influx of them has now been stopped, not
under an Immigration Restriction Act, but by private treaty with Japan;
and, as a measure of precaution, an Arms Registration Ordinance provides
that no citizen shall have in his possession firearms unless he is
licensed by the Government. But this precaution would be in vain if
Japan ever seriously thought of using her 50,000 soldier-citizens in the
Hawaiian Group against the United States; for the whole of the fishing
industry is in the hands of the Japanese, and their sampans could land
arms at various places on the islands with ease. Such a contingency has
been foreseen in the laying out of Honolulu as a naval base, and the
land fortifications are designed with the same thoroughness as those
designed to beat off a sea attack.

A glance at the map will show that the Power which holds Hawaii with a
powerful Fleet can dominate the whole of the Northern Pacific,
threatening every point east and west. The American position there is
weakened by only one circumstance, the great Japanese population. This,
though it may not be recruited with further drafts of males from its
native source, will always be a very considerable, if not the most
considerable, element of the Hawaiian population, for most of the
coolies are married, and the Japanese abroad as well as at home fills
the cradle industriously.

I remember on the morning of April 1, 1909, coming into Honolulu city
from the Moana Hotel on the sea-beach, I found the tram rushed by
Japanese at all the stopping places. Two cruisers of their navy had
entered the harbour--cruisers which were once upon a time the Russian
_Variag_ and _Koreitz_. All Japan in Honolulu was making holiday. A
fleet of sampans (the Japanese fishing-vessel) surrounded the ships,
which commemorated so signally a great and successful war. The water
front was lined with Japanese, the women and children mostly in their
national costume. One Japanese father came on to the tram with seven
boys, the eldest of whom did not seem more than ten years of age.
Asked, he said that they were all his own children. There will never be
a lack of a big Japanese population in Hawaii.

The definite acquisition of Hawaii may be fairly dated from 1851. Before
then there had been a significant proof of America's gaze turning
westward by the appointment in 1844 of Mr Caleb Cushing as the United
States Ambassador to the Court of China. A little later (1854) the
American Power found the Japanese policy of exclusiveness intolerable,
and United States warships broke a way into Japanese ports. It had also
been decided by then that the task, originally undertaken by a French
Company, of cutting a waterway across the Panama Isthmus should be the
responsibility of the United States. British susceptibilities on the
point were soothed by the Clayton-Bulwer treaty guaranteeing the
neutrality of the canal, a treaty which was subsequently abrogated in
response to the increasing deference which the growing power of the
American Republic could exact. That abrogation created the present
position which gives the United States sole control of that canal, and
the right to fortify its entrances.

By the middle of the nineteenth century, therefore, the United States, a
Power which some people still insist on regarding as an essentially
domestic character interested only in purely American affairs, had
established herself in a commanding strategical position in the North
Pacific, had constituted herself the arbiter of Japanese national
manners, and had obtained the control of the future waterway from the
Atlantic to the Pacific. The second half of the same century was
destined to see an even more remarkable Imperial expansion. The
misgovernment of Cuba by Spain became intolerable to American public
opinion, and in 1898 war was declared with the avowed purpose of
conferring the blessings of freedom on the people of Cuba. If one
accepted the nonsensical view that the United States is a Power lifted
above ordinary human nature by some mysterious racial alchemy, it would
be difficult to understand why a war to free Cuba should also have been
waged in another ocean to acquire the Philippines. But, looking at the
matter in a sane light, it was natural that, being engaged in a war with
Spain, the United States should strike at Spain wherever a blow was
possible and should destroy the Spanish power in the Pacific Ocean as
well as in the Caribbean Sea. Besides, the opportunity offered of
stretching the arm of America right across the Pacific to the very coast
of Asia. The Filipinos did not relish the substitution for the weak rule
of Spain of the strong rule of the United States, and American
Imperialism had the experience of having to force, by stern warfare on
the liberated, acceptance of its rôle of liberator. Perhaps the
experience taught it some sympathy with older players at the game of
Empire-making: certainly it did not abate its ardour in the good work.

So much for the past history of the United States in the Pacific. A
forecast of her influence on the future of the ocean is clearly
indicated by the past. The United States spread from the east of the
North American continent to the west, because there is no method known
to prevent the extension of a highly civilised, a young, an ardent
nation at the expense of backward, effete and tired peoples. It was
impossible that either the Red Indian tribes or the picturesque old
settlements of the Californian Spanish should stand in the way of the
American Republic stretching from ocean to ocean. Once the United States
was established on the Pacific coast, it was equally inevitable that the
arm of her power should stretch across the ocean. The acquisition of the
Hawaiian Group was necessary for the sound defence of the coast. The
American trading ships which sought the coast of Asia and found barbaric
barriers against commerce being battered down by European venturers, had
to do as the other White Men did. The flag thus had to follow in the
wake of the trade. It was all natural, necessary and ultimately
beneficial to civilisation. Equally inevitable will be the future
expansion of the United States in the Pacific. The overwhelming strength
of her industrial organisation will give her a first call on the neutral
markets of the ocean--_i.e._ those markets to which she has the same
right of access as her trade rivals. As the tendency shows for the area
of those neutral markets to narrow through coming under the domination
of various Powers, the United States will seek to extend her domination
too. The protection of what she has will enforce the need of acquiring
other strategical points. So her Pacific possessions will grow, almost
unconsciously, just as the British Empire grew.




CHAPTER VI

GREAT BRITAIN'S ENTRY INTO THE PACIFIC


Off the coast of China at a point where, in a strategical map the
"spheres of influence" of Japan and the United States and Germany would
impinge, is the island of Hong Kong, the Far East station of the British
Empire. Further south, in the Malay Peninsula, is Singapore, standing
guard over the entrance to the Indian Ocean. On these two coaling
stations British naval power in the North Pacific is based. The
abandonment of either of them is unthinkable to-day, yet neither was
taken possession of until the nineteenth century--Singapore in 1819,
Hong Kong in 1841. In the South Pacific there was shown an even stronger
hesitation in acquiring territory.

Why Great Britain entered so reluctantly into the Pacific as a
colonising Power may probably be explained by the fact that at the time
the ocean came to be exploited British earth hunger had been satiated.
The unsuccessful war which attempted to hold the American colonies to
the Mother Country, had made her doubtful whether overseas dominions
were altogether a blessing and whether the advantage to be gained from
them outweighed the responsibilities which their holding entailed. It
seemed to be the natural conclusion from the American War of
Independence, that once a colony or a group of colonies arrived at the
stage of growth which allowed it to be of some use to the Mother
Country, the inevitable next development was for it to throw off the
bonds of kinship and enter upon a career of independence at the price of
an expensive and humiliating war to its parent. Thus, whilst British
sailors were to the front in the exploration of the Pacific, British
statesmen showed a great reluctance to take any advantage of their
discoveries; and it was a series of accidents rather than any settled
purpose which planted the Anglo-Saxon race so firmly in this ocean.
India, it must be noted, a century ago was a country having very little
direct concern with the Pacific. The holding of the Indian Empire did
not depend on any position in the Pacific. That situation has since
changed, and Great Britain would be forced to an interest in the Pacific
by her Indian Empire if she had no other possessions in the ocean.

In an earlier chapter on Japan, something has been written concerning
the reasons which would argue for the absence of an Imperial impulse in
the Japanese islands and its presence in the British islands. The
inquiry then suggested as to the instincts of expansion and dominion
which were primarily responsible for the growth of the British Empire is
full of fascination for the historian. If it comes to be considered
carefully, the Empire-making of the British people was throughout the
result of a racial impulse working instinctively, spasmodically, though
unerringly, towards an unseen goal, rather than of a designed and
purposeful statesmanship.

The racial origin of the British people dictated peremptorily a policy
of oversea adventure, and that adventure led inevitably to colonisation.
In the beginning Britain was a part of Gaul, a temperate and fertile
peninsula which by right of latitude should have had the temperature of
Labrador, but which, because of the Gulf Stream, enjoyed a climate
singularly mild and promotive of fecundity. When the separation from the
mainland came because of the North Sea cutting the English Channel, the
Gallic tribes left in Britain began to acquire, as the fruits of their
gracious environment and their insular position, an exclusive patriotism
and a comparative immunity from invasion. These made the Briton at once
very proud of his country and not very fitted to defend its shores.

With the Roman invasion there came to the future British race a benefit
from both those causes. The comparative ease of the conquest by the
Roman Power, holding as it did the mastery of the seas, freed the
ensuing settlement by the conquerors from a good deal of the bitterness
which would have followed a desperate resistance. The Romans were
generous winners and good colonists. Once their power was established
firmly, they treated a subject race with kindly consideration. Soon,
too, the local pride of the Britons affected their victors. The Roman
garrison came to take an interest in their new home, an interest which
was aided by the singular beauty and fertility of the country. It was
not long before Carausius, a Roman general in Britain, had set himself
up as independent of Italy, and with the aid of sea-power he maintained
his position for some years. The Romans and the Britons, too, freely
intermarried, and at the time when the failing power of the Empire
compelled the withdrawal of the Roman garrison, the south of Britain was
as much Romanised as, say, northern Africa or Spain.

Thus from the very dawn of known history natural position and climate
marked out Britain as the vat for the brewing of a strenuous blood. The
sea served her "in the office of a wall or of a moat defensive to a
house" to keep away all but the most vigorous of invaders. The charm and
fertility of the land made it certain that a bold and vigorous invader
would be tempted to become a colonist and not be satisfied with robbing
and passing on.

With the decay of the Roman Empire, and the withdrawal of the Roman
legions to the defence of Rome, the Romanised Britons were left
helpless. Civilisation and the growth of riches had made them at once
more desirable objects of prey, and less able to resist attack. The
province which Rome abandoned was worried on all sides by the incursion
of the fierce clans of the north and the west. A decision, ultimately
wise, judged by its happy results, but at the moment disastrous, induced
some of the harried Britons to call in to their aid the Norsemen
pirates, who at the time, taking advantage of the failing authority of
Rome, were swarming out from Scandinavia and from the shores of the
Baltic in search of booty. The Angles, the Saxons, the Jutes, were
willing enough to come to Britain as mercenaries, even more willing to
stay as colonists. An Anglo-Saxon wave swept over the greater part of
England, and was stopped only by the mountains of Wales or of Scotland.
That was the end of the Britons as the chief power in Britain, but they
mingled with their conquerors to modify the Anglo-Saxon type with an
infusion of Celtic blood. In the mountainous districts the Celtic blood
continued to predominate, and does to this day.

The Anglo-Saxons would have been very content to settle down peacefully
on the fat lands which had fallen to them, but the piratical nests from
which they themselves had issued still sent forth broods of hungry
adventurers, and the invasions of the Danes taught the Anglo-Saxons that
what steel had won must be guarded by steel. They learned, too, that any
race holding England must rely upon sea-power for peaceful existence.
After the Danish, the last great element in the making of the present
British race, was the Norman. The Normans were not so much foreigners
as might be supposed. The Anglo-Saxons of the day were descendants of
sea-pirates who had settled in Britain and mingled their blood with the
British. The Normans were descendants of kindred sea-pirates who had
settled in Gaul, and mingled their blood with that of the Gauls and
Franks. The two races, Anglo-Saxon and Normans, after a while combined
amicably enough, the Anglo-Saxon blood predominating, and the British
type was evolved, in part Celtic, in part Danish, in part Anglo-Saxon,
in part Norman--a hard-fighting, stubborn adventurous race, which in its
making from such varied elements had learned the value of compromise,
and of the common-sense principle of give-and-take. One can see that it
was just the race for the work of exploration and colonisation.

When this British people, thus constituted, were driven back to a
sea-frontier by the French nation, it was natural that they should turn
their energies overseas. To this their Anglo-Saxon blood, their Danish
blood, their Norman blood prompted. The Elizabethan era, which was the
era of the foundation of the British Empire overseas, was marked by a
form of patriotism which was hard to distinguish in some of its
manifestations from plain robbery. The fact calls for no particular
condemnation. It was according to the habit of thought of the time. But
it is necessary to bear in mind that the hunt for loot and not the
desire for territory was the chief motive of the flashing glories of the
Elizabethan era of seamanship; for that is the explanation why there
was left as the fruit of many victories few permanent settlements.

Drake was the first English naval leader to penetrate to the Pacific.
His famous circumnavigation of the world is one of the boldest exploits
of history. Drake's log entry on entering the Pacific stirs the blood:

"Now, as we were fallen to the uttermost parts of these islands on
October 28, 1578, our troubles did make an end, the storm ceased, and
all our calamities (only the absence of our friends excepted) were
removed, as if God all this while by His secret Providence had led us to
make this discovery, which being had according to His will, He stayed
His hand."

On this voyage Drake put in at San Francisco, which he named New Albion.
He went back to Europe through the East Indies and around Africa. But
Drake made no attempt at colonisation. Looting of the Spanish treasure
ships was the first and last object of his cruise. What was, according
to our present lights, a more honourable descent upon the Pacific was
that of Admiral Anson in the eighteenth century. He, in 1740, took a
Fleet round the stormy Horn to subdue the Philippines and break the
power of Spain in the Pacific. The force thought fitting for such an
enterprise in those days was 961 men! Anson did not subdue the
Philippines; but they were guarded by the scurvy, which attacked the
English Fleet, rather than by the Spanish might, and the little
disease-racked English squadron was able to cripple the Spanish power in
the Pacific by the mere dread of its presence. Anson took prizes and
made them masquerade before the enemy's coast as hostile warships, and
paralysed the Spanish commerce in those seas. He returned to England
with only 335 men out of his original complement of 961. Practically all
the deaths had been from disease. But again the idea of the Pacific
expedition was not to colonise but to strike a blow at a rival European
Power. It was not until the nineteenth century that Great Britain
established herself on the western flank of the North Pacific.

So far as the South Pacific was concerned British indifference was
complete, and it was shared by other nations. In the days when the
fabled wealth of the Indies was the magnet to draw men of courage and
worth to perilous undertakings by sea and land, there was nothing in the
South Pacific to attract their greed, and nothing, therefore, to
stimulate their enterprise. The Spaniard, blundering on America in his
quest for a western sea-passage to the ivory, the gold, and the spices
of India, found there a land with more possibilities of plunder than
that which he had originally sought. He was content to remain, looting
the treasuries of the Mexicans and of the Peruvians for metals, and
laying the forests of Central America under contribution for precious
woods. He ventured but little westward, and the Hawaiian Islands
represented for a time the extreme western limit of his adventures.
Following him for plunder came the English, and they too were content to
sweep along the western coast of South America without venturing further
towards the unknown west.

From another direction the sea-route to India was sought by Portuguese,
and Dutch, and English and French. Groping round the African coast, they
came in time to the land of their desires, and found besides India and
Cathay, Java, the Spice Islands, and other rich groups of the Malay
Archipelago. But they, just as the Spaniards, did not venture west from
South America; and neither Portuguese, Dutch, French nor English set the
course of their vessels south from the East Indies.

It was thus Australia remained for many years an unknown continent. And
when at last navigators, more bold or less bound to an immediate greed,
touched upon the shores of Australia, or called at the South Sea
Islands, they found little that was attractive. In no case had the
simple natives won to a greed for gold and silver, and so they had no
accumulations of wealth to tempt cupidity. In the case of Australia the
coast-line was dour and forbidding, and promised nothing but sterility.

The exploring period in which the desire for plunder was the chief
motive passed away, having spared the South Pacific. It was therefore
the fate of Australia, of New Zealand, and of most of the islands of
Polynesia and Melanesia, to be settled under happier conditions, and to
be spared the excesses of cruelty which marked the European invasion of
the West Indies and the Americas. The Newest World began its
acquaintance with civilisation under fairly happy auspices.

It was not until the middle of the seventeenth century that a scientific
expedition brought the South Pacific before the attention of Britain. A
transit of Venus across the sun promised to yield valuable knowledge as
to the nature of solar phenomena. To observe the transit under the best
conditions, astronomers knew that a station in the South Seas was
necessary, and Lieutenant Cook, R.N., an officer who had already
distinguished himself in the work of exploration, was promoted to be
Captain and entrusted to lead a scientific expedition to Otaheite. Added
to his commission was an injunction to explore the South Seas if time
and opportunity offered. Captain Cook was of the type which makes time
and opportunity. Certainly there was little in the equipment of his
expedition to justify an extension of its duties after the transit of
Venus had been duly observed. But he took it that his duty was to
explore the South Seas, and explore them he did, incidentally annexing
for the British Empire the Continent of Australia.

That was in 1770. But still there was so little inviting in the prospect
of settlement in the South Seas that it was some eighteen years before
any effort was made to follow up by colonisation this annexation by
Captain Cook. When the effort was made it was not on very dignified
lines. The American colonies had at one time served as an outlet for the
overflow of the British prisons. The War of Independence had closed that
channel. The overcrowding of the British prisons became desperate, and,
because it was necessary to find some relief for this--not because it
was considered advantageous to populate the new possession--the First
Fleet sailed for the foundation of Australia in 1788.

We shall see in subsequent chapters how the reluctance of the governing
Power of the British race in the Home Country to establish an Empire in
the South Pacific found a curious response in the stubborn resoluteness
of the colonists who settled in Australia and New Zealand to be more
English than the English themselves, to be as aggressively Imperialistic
almost as the men of the Elizabethan era. (What might almost be called
the "Jingoism" of the British nations in the South Pacific must have a
very important effect in settling the mastery of that ocean.) In the
present chapter the establishment of the British Power in the North
Pacific chiefly will be considered.

Singapore is to-day the capital of the three Straits Settlements--
Singapore, Penang, and Malacca, but it is the youngest of the three
settlements. Malacca is the oldest. It was taken possession of by the
Portuguese under Albuquerque in 1511, and held by them until 1641, when
the Dutch were successful in driving them out. The settlement remained
under the Government of the Dutch till 1795, when it was captured by
the English, and held by them till 1818, at which date it was restored
to the Dutch, and finally passed into British hands in pursuance of the
treaty with Holland of 1824. By that treaty it was arranged that the
Dutch should leave the Malay Peninsula, the British Government agreeing
at the same time to leave Sumatra to the Dutch. When Malacca was taken
possession of by the Portuguese in 1511, it was one of the great
centres for the commerce of the East; but under Dutch rule it dwindled,
and Penang acquired a monopoly of the trade of the Malayan Peninsula
and Sumatra, together with a large traffic with China, Siam, Borneo,
the Celebes, and other places in the Archipelago. When Singapore was
established Penang in its turn had to yield the first place to the new
city.

Singapore was acquired for Britain by Sir Stamford Raffles in 1819, by
virtue of a treaty with the Johore princes. It was at first subordinate
to Bencoolen in Sumatra, but in 1823 it was placed under the Government
of Bengal; it was afterwards incorporated in 1826, with Penang and
Malacca, and placed under the Governor and Council of the Incorporated
Settlements. Singapore is now one of the great shipping ports of the
world, served by some fifty lines of steamers, and with a trade of over
20,000,000 tons a year. The harbour of Singapore is fortified, and the
port is indicated by one advanced school of British Imperialists as the
future chief base of a Fleet, contributed to by India, Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa, and Canada, and kept to a standard of strength
equal to that available to any other two Powers in the Pacific. Captain
Macaulay, in a strategical scheme for Imperial Defence which has been
received with deep attention in Great Britain, suggests:--

"The influence which an Indian Ocean Fleet, based on Colombo and
Singapore, would have on Imperial Defence can hardly be exaggerated. The
Indian Ocean--a British Mediterranean to the Pacific--with its openings
east and west in our hands, is a position of readiness for naval action
in the Western Pacific, the South Atlantic, or the Mediterranean. In the
first case it influences the defence of Canada and the Australasian
States; in the second, that of South Africa. An Indian Ocean Fleet can
reinforce, or be reinforced by the Fleets in European waters, if the
storm centre be confined to Europe or to the Pacific. As regards the
direct naval defence of the Australasian Provinces, no better position
could be chosen than that of a Fleet based on Singapore, with an
advanced base at Hong Kong, because it flanks all possible attack on
them. An advanced flank defence is better than any direct defence of so
large a coast-line as that of Australia from any point within it.
Moreover, Singapore and Hong Kong are much nearer to the naval bases of
any Powers in the Western Pacific than those countries are to Australia
or to Canada. Hence, in operations for the defence of any Province, they
favour offensive-defensive action on our part. And offensive-defensive
is the great characteristic of naval power. Any East Asian Power
contemplating aggression against Australasian or North American
territory must evidently first deal with the Indian Ocean Fleet.

"It is impossible to ignore the strategical and political significance
of the Imperial triangle of India based on South Africa and the
Australasian States, and its influence in the solution of the new
problems of Imperial Defence. The effective naval defence of the
self-governing Provinces is best secured by a Fleet maintained in the
North Indian Ocean; and the reinforcement of the British garrison in
India is best secured by units of the Imperial Army maintained in the
self-governing Provinces. If these two conditions are satisfied, the
problem of the defence of the Mother Country is capable of easy
solution."

Hong Kong is of less strategical importance than Singapore. But it is
marked out as the advanced base of British naval power in the North
Pacific. It has one of the most magnificent harbours in the world, with
an area of ten square miles. The granite hills which surround it rise
between 2000 and 3000 feet high. The city of Victoria extends for four
miles at the base of the hills which protect the south side of the
harbour, and contains, with its suburbs, 326,961 inhabitants. It is the
present base of the China squadron, and is fortified and garrisoned.

As already stated, the conditions which some years ago made the mastery
of the Pacific unimportant to India no longer exist, and the safety of
the Indian Empire depends almost as closely on the position in the
Pacific as the safety of England does on the position in the Atlantic.
But, except by making some references in future chapters on strategy and
on trade to her resources and possibilities, I do not propose to attempt
any consideration of India in this volume. That would unduly enlarge its
scope. In these days of quick communication, both power and trade are
very fluid, and there is really not any country of the earth which has
not in some way an influence on the Pacific. But so far as possible I
have sought to deal only with the direct factors.

Having noted the British possessions in the North Pacific, it is
necessary to turn south and study the young "nations of the blood" below
the Equator before estimating British Power in the Pacific.




CHAPTER VII

THE BRITISH CONTINENT IN THE PACIFIC


Those who seek to find in history the evidence of an all-wise purpose
might gather from the fantastic history of Australasia facts to confirm
their faith. Far back in prehistoric ages, this great island was cut
adrift from the rest of the world and left lonely and apart in the
Southern Pacific. A few prehistoric marsupials wandered over its
territory and were hunted by poor nomads of men, without art or
architecture, condemned by the conditions of their life to step aside
from the great onward current of human evolution.

Over this land the winds swept and the rains fell, and, volcanic action
having ceased, the mountains were denuded and their deep stores of
minerals bared until gold lay about on the surface. Coal, copper,
silver, tin, and iron too, were made plentifully accessible. At the same
time enormous agricultural plains were formed in the interior, but under
climatic conditions which allowed no development of vegetable or animal
types without organised culture by a civilised people.

Nature thus seemed to work consciously for the making of a country
uniquely fitted for civilisation by a White Race, whilst at the same
time ensuring that its aboriginal inhabitants should not be able to
profit by its betterment, and thus raise themselves to a degree of
social organisation which would allow them to resist an invading White
Race. In the year when Captain Cook acquired the Continent of Australia
for Great Britain, it was ripe for development by civilised effort in a
way which no other territory of the earth then was; and yet was so
hopelessly sterile to man without machinery and the other apparatus of
human science, that its aboriginal inhabitants were the most forlorn of
the world's peoples, living a starveling life dependent on poor hunting,
scanty fisheries and a few roots for existence.

It needs no great stretch of fancy to see a mysterious design in the
world-history of Australia. Here was a great area of land stuffed with
precious and useful minerals, hidden away from the advancing
civilisation of man as effectually as if it had been in the planet Mars.
In other parts of the globe great civilisations rose and fell--the
Assyrian, the Egyptian, the Chinese, the Greek, the Roman,--all drawing
from the bowels of the earth her hidden treasures, and drawing on her
surface riches with successive harvests. In America, the Mexican,
Peruvian and other civilisations learned to gather from the great stocks
of Nature, and built up fabrics of greatness from her rifled treasures.
In Australia alone, amid dim, mysterious forests, the same prehistoric
animals roamed, the same poor nomads of men lived and died, neither
tilling nor mining the earth--tenants in occupation, content with a bare
and accidental livelihood in the midst of mighty riches.

Australia too was not discovered by the White Man until the moment when
a young nation could be founded on the discovered principles of Justice.
To complete the marvel, as it would seem, Providence ordained that its
occupation and development should be by the one people most eminently
fitted for the founding of a new nation on the virgin soil.

The fostering care of Nature did not end there. The early settlers
coming to Australia not only found that nothing had been drawn from the
soil or reef, that an absolutely virgin country was theirs to exploit,
but also were greeted by a singularly happy climate, free of all the
diseases which afflicted older lands. Prolific Australia, with all its
marvellous potentialities, lay open to them, with no warlike tribes to
enforce a bloody beginning to history, no epidemics to war against, no
savage beasts to encounter. And they were greeted by an energising
climate which seemed to encourage the best faculties of man, just as it
gave to harvests a wonderful richness and to herds a marvellous
fecundity.

How it came to be that such a vast area of the earth's surface, so near
to the great Indian and Chinese civilisations, should have so long
remained unknown, it is difficult to understand. There is faint evidence
that the existence of the great Southern continent was guessed at in
very early days, but no attempt at exploration or settlement was made by
the Hindoos or the Chinese. When the Greeks, who had penetrated to India
under Alexander the Great, returned to their homes, they brought back
some talk of a continent south from India, and the later Greek
literature and some Latin writers have allusions to the tale. Marco Polo
(thirteenth century), during his voyages to the East Indies, seems to
have heard of a Southern continent, for he speaks of a Java Major, a
land much greater than the isle of Java (which he knew), and which was
probably either New Guinea or Australia. On a fifteenth-century map of
the world now in the British Museum there are indications of a knowledge
of the existence of Australia; and it is undoubtedly included in a map
of the world of the sixteenth century.

But there was evidently no curiosity as to the suspected new continent.
Australia to-day contains not the slightest trace of contact with
ancient or Middle Ages civilisation. Exploration was attracted to the
East Indies and to Cathay by the tales of spices, scents, gold, silver,
and ivory. No such tales came from Australia. It was to prove the
greatest gold-producing country of the world, but its natives had no
hunger for the precious metal, though it was strewn about the ground in
great lumps in some places. Nor did sugar, spice, and ivory come from
the land; nor, indeed, any product of man's industry or Nature's
bounty. Wrapped in its mysterious grey-green forests, protected by a
coast-line which appeared always barren and inhospitable, Australia
remained unknown until comparatively modern times.

In 1581 the Spaniards, under Magalhaes, reached the Philippine Islands
by sailing west from the South American coast. In the nature of things
their ships would have touched the coast of Australia. In 1606 De Quiros
and De Torres reached some of the Oceanian islands, and named one _Terra
Austrialia del Espiritu Santo_ (the Southern Land of the Holy Spirit).
As was the case with Columbus in his voyage of discovery to America, De
Quiros had not touched the mainland, but his voyage gave the name
"Australia" to the new continent.

The English were late in the work of exploring the coast of Australia,
though as far back as 1624 there is a record of Sir William Courteen
petitioning King James I. for leave to plant colonies in "Terra
Australis." In 1688, William Dampier, in the _Cygnet_, touched at the
north-western coast of Australia. The next year, in H.M.S. _Roebuck_, he
paid a visit to the new land, and, on returning to England, put on
record his impressions of its fauna and flora. It was in 1770 that
Captain Cook made the first landing at Botany Bay.

The British nation at the time could find no use for Australia. Annexed
in 1770 it was not colonised until 1787, when the idea was adopted of
using the apparently sterile and miserable Southern continent as a
depôt for enforced exiles. It was a happy chance that sent a "racketty"
element of British social life to be the first basis of the new
Australian population. The poachers, English Chartists, Irish Fenians,
Scottish land rebels (who formed the majority of the convicts sent to
Australia) were good as nation-building material.

There was work to do there in the Pacific, there is further work in the
future, which calls for elements of audacity, of contempt for
convention, which are being worked out of the average British type.
There could be no greater contrast between, say, a London suburbanite,
whose life travels along an endless maze of little gravel paths between
fences and trimly-kept hedges, and the Australian of the "back country,"
who any day may ride out solitary on a week's journey into a great
sun-baked wilderness, his life and that of his dog and his two horses
dependent on the accurate finding of a series of water-holes: his joy in
existence coming from the solitude and the desert, the companionship of
his three animals, his tobacco, and the thought of his "mate" somewhere,
whom he would meet after six months' absence with a handshake and a
monosyllable by way of greeting, and yet with the love of a fond
brother.

That London suburbanite gives the key to his kindly and softly
sentimental character in his subscription to a society which devotes
itself to seeing that the suburban house cat is not left shut up without
food when a family goes away on holidays. That Australian shows how far
he has reverted to the older human type of relentless purpose when, in
the pursuit of his calling, he puts ten thousand sheep to the chance of
death from thirst. It is not that he is needlessly cruel, but that he is
sternly resolute. The same man would share his last water with his dog
in the desert to give both an equal chance of life. He feels the misery
of beasts but says nothing, and allows it to interfere nothing with his
purpose.

There is a story of a clergyman coming to a back-country station in
Australia during the agony of a great drought. He asked of the squatter
permission to hold prayers for rain in the woolshed. The squatter turned
on him, fiercely gripping him by the arm.

"Listen!" he cried.

From all around came the hoarse, pitiful lowing and bleating of
thousands of animals dying of thirst and hunger.

"Listen! If the Almighty does not hear _that_, will he hear us?"

That is the type of man, bred from the wilder types of the British race,
who is the backbone of the Australian population, and who will be the
backbone of the resistance which the White Man will make to any overflow
of Asia along the Pacific littoral.

The Australian took instinctively to his task in the work of White
civilisation--that of keeping the Asiatic out of Australia. In the early
days of the goldfields, the Chinese began to crowd to the continent, and
some squatters of those days designed to introduce them as cheap and
reliable shepherds. The mass of the White population protested, with
riot and rebellion in some cases. At one time it seemed as though the
guns of British warships would fire on Australian citizens in
vindication of the right of Chinese to enter Australia. But maternal
affection was stronger than logic. The cause of "White Australia" had
its way; and by poll taxes and other restrictive legislation any great
influx of Asiatics was stopped. At a later date the laws regarding alien
immigration were so strengthened that it is now almost impossible for a
coloured man to enter Australia as a colonist, even though he be a
British subject and a graduate of Oxford University.

Around the ethics of the "White Australia" policy there has raged a
fierce controversy. But it is certain that, without that policy, without
an instinctive revolt on the part of the Australian colonists against
any intrusion of coloured races, Australia would be to-day an Asiatic
colony, still nominally held, perhaps, by a small band of White
suzerains, but ripe to fall at any moment into the hands of its
10,000,000 or 20,000,000 Asiatic inhabitants.

Instead of that, Australia is at once the fortress which the White Race
has thinly garrisoned against an Asiatic advance southward, and the most
tempting prize to inspire the Asiatic to that advance. There is not the
least doubt that, given Australia, Japan could establish a power
threatening the very greatest in Europe. Her fecund people within a
couple of generations would people the coast-line and prepare for the
colonisation of the interior. Rich fields and rich mines put at the
disposal of a frugal and industrious people would yield enormous
material wealth.

An organised China would put the island continent to even greater use.
But there Australia is, held by a tiny White population, which increases
very slowly (for men and women have the ideas of comfort and luxury
which lead to small families), but which is now fairly awake to the fact
that on the bosom of the Pacific and along its shores will be fought the
great race battles of the future.

It is curious for the peoples of Europe, accustomed to associate extreme
democracy and socialistic leanings with ideals of pacificism and
"international brotherhood," to observe the warlike spirit of the
Australian peoples. There are no folk more "advanced" in politics. Their
ideal is frankly stated to be to make a "working man's Paradise" of the
continent. Yet they are entering cheerfully on a great naval
expenditure, and their adoption of a system of universal training for
military service provides the only instance, except that of Switzerland,
where the responsibility of national defence is freely accepted by the
citizen manhood of the nation.

Universal training for military service in Australia, legally enforced
in 1909, was made inevitable in 1903, when in taking over the
administration of the defences the first Commonwealth Government
provided in its Defence Act for the levying of the whole male population
for service in case of war. That provision was evidence of the wholesome
and natural view taken by Australians of the citizen's duty to his
nation. It was also evidence of an ignorance of, or a blindness to, the
conditions of modern campaigning. Raw levies, if equipped with courage
and hardihood, could be of almost immediate usefulness in the warfare of
a century ago. To-day they would be worse than useless, a burden on the
commissariat, no support in the field. The logical Australian mind was
quick to recognise this. Within five years it was established that,
admitting a universal duty to serve, a necessary sequence was universal
training for service.

One argument the Australian advocates of universal service had not to
meet. In that pioneer country the feeling which is responsible for a
kind of benevolent cosmopolitanism, and finds expression in Peace
Societies, had little chance of growth. The direct conflict with Nature
had brought a sense of the reality of life's struggle, of its reality
and of its essential beauty. There is no maundering horror of the
natural facts of existence. Australian veins when scratched bleed red
blood, not a pale ichor of Olympus. The combative instinct is recognised
as a part of human nature, a necessary and valuable part. That
defencelessness is the best means of defence would never occur to the
Australian as being anything but an absurd idea. He recognises the part
which the combative instinct has played, the part it still must play in
civilisation: how in its various phases it has assisted man in his
upward path; how it has still some part to play in the preservation and
further evolution of civilisation.

The original fighting instinct was purely brutal--a rough deadly
scramble for food. But it undoubtedly had its value in securing the
survival of the best types for the propagation of the species. With its
first great refinement, in becoming the fight for mateship, the
combative instinct was still more valuable to evolution. The next step,
when fights came to be for ideas, marked a rapid growth of civilisation.
Exclude chivalry, patriotism, Imperialism, from the motives of the
world, and there would never have been a great civilisation.

A distinguished British statesman spoke the other day of the expenditure
on armaments as possibly a sign of "relapsing into barbarism." He might
more truly have described it as an insurance against barbarism--at once
a sign of the continued existence of the forces which made civilisation,
and a proof that the advanced races are prepared to guard with the sword
what they have won by the sword. The Pacific has seen the tragedy of one
nation which, having won to a suave and graceful civilisation, came to
utter ruin through the elimination of the combative instinct from its
people. The Peruvians had apparently everything to make life happy: but
because they had eliminated the fighting instinct their civilisation was
shattered to fragments in a year by the irruption of a handful of
Spaniards.

The Australian feels that safety and independence must be paid for with
strength, and not with abjectness. He does not wish to be another
Peruvian: and he builds up his socialistic Utopia with a sword in one
hand as was built a temple of Jerusalem.

Some doubt having arisen in the Australian mind, after a system of
universal training had been adopted, whether the scheme of training was
sufficient, the greatest organiser of the British Army, Field Marshal
Lord Kitchener, was asked to visit the Commonwealth and report on that
point. His report suggested some slight changes, which were promptly
adopted, but on the whole he approved thoroughly of the proposed scheme,
though it provided periods of training which seem startlingly small to
the European soldier. But Lord Kitchener agreed, as every other
competent observer has agreed, that the Australian is so much of a
natural soldier owing to his pioneering habit of life, that it takes but
little special military discipline to make him an effective fighting
unit.

Committed to a military system which will, in a short time, make some
200,000 citizens soldiers available in case of need, Australia's martial
enthusiasm finds expression also in a naval programme which is of great
magnitude for so small a people. In July 1909, an Imperial Conference on
Defence met in London, and the British Admiralty brought down certain
proposals for Imperial naval co-operation. _Inter alia_, the British
Admiralty memorandum stated:--

"In the opinion of the Admiralty, a Dominion Government desirous of
creating a Navy should aim at forming a distinct Fleet unit; and the
smallest unit is one which, while manageable in time of peace, is
capable of being used in its component parts in the time of war.

"Under certain conditions the establishment of local defence flotillas,
consisting of torpedo craft and submarines, might be of assistance in
time of war to the operations of the Fleet, but such flotillas cannot
co-operate on the high seas in the wider duties of protection of trade
and preventing attacks from hostile cruisers and squadrons. The
operations of Destroyers and torpedo-boats are necessarily limited to
the waters near the coast or to a radius of action not far distant from
a base, while there are great difficulties in manning such a force and
keeping it always thoroughly efficient.

"A scheme limited to torpedo craft would not in itself, moreover, be a
good means of gradually developing a self-contained Fleet capable of
both offence and defence. Unless a naval force--whatever its
size--complies with this condition, it can never take its proper place
in the organisation of an Imperial Navy distributed strategically over
the whole area of British interests.

"The Fleet unit to be aimed at should, therefore, in the opinion of the
Admiralty, consist at least of the following: one armoured cruiser (new
_Indomitable_ class, which is of the _Dreadnought_ type), three
unarmoured cruisers (_Bristol_ class), six destroyers, three submarines,
with the necessary auxiliaries such as depôt and store ships, etc.,
which are not here specified.

"Such a Fleet unit would be capable of action not only in the defence of
coasts, but also of the trade routes, and would be sufficiently powerful
to deal with small hostile squadrons, should such ever attempt to act in
its waters.

"Simply to man such a squadron, omitting auxiliary requirements and any
margin for reliefs, sickness, etc., the minimum numbers required would
be about 2300 officers and men, according to the Admiralty scheme of
complements.

"The estimated first cost of building and arming such a complete Fleet
unit would be approximately £3,700,000, and the cost of maintenance,
including upkeep of vessels, pay, and interest and sinking fund, at
British rates, approximately £600,000 per annum.

"The estimated cost of the officers and men required to man the ships
does not comprise the whole cost. There would be other charges to be
provided for, such as the pay of persons employed in subsidiary
services, those undergoing training, sick, in reserve, etc.

"As the armoured cruiser is the essential part of the Fleet unit, it is
important that an _Indomitable_ of the _Dreadnought_ type should be the
first vessel to be built in commencing the formation of a Fleet unit.
She should be officered and manned, as far as possible, by Colonial
officers and men, supplemented by the loan of Imperial officers and men
who might volunteer for the service. While on the station the ship would
be under the exclusive control of the Dominion Government as regards her
movements and general administration, but officers and men would be
governed by regulations similar to the King's Regulations, and be under
naval discipline. The question of pay and allowances would have to be
settled on lines the most suitable to each Dominion Government
concerned. The other vessels, when built, would be treated in the same
manner.

"It is recognised that, to carry out completely such a scheme as that
indicated, would ultimately mean a greater charge for naval defence than
that which the Dominions have hitherto borne; but, on the other hand,
the building of a _Dreadnought_ (or its equivalent), which certain
Governments have offered to undertake, would form part of the scheme,
and therefore, as regards the most expensive item of the shipbuilding
programme suggested, no additional cost to those Governments would be
involved.

"_Pari passu_ with the creation of the Fleet unit, it would be necessary
to consider the development of local resources in everything which
relates to the maintenance of a Fleet. A careful inquiry should be made
into the shipbuilding and repairing establishments, with a view to their
general adaptation to the needs of the local squadron. Training schools
for officers and men would have to be established; arrangements would
have to be made for the manufacture, supply, and replenishment of the
various naval, ordnance, and victualling stores required by the
squadron.

"All these requirements might be met according to the views of the
Dominion Governments, in so far as the form and manner of the provision
made are concerned. But as regards shipbuilding, armaments, and warlike
stores, etc., on the one hand, and training and discipline in peace and
war, on the other, there should be one common standard. If the Fleet
unit maintained by a Dominion is to be treated as an integral part of
the Imperial forces, with a wide range of interchangeability among its
component parts with those forces, its general efficiency should be the
same, and the facilities for refitting and replenishing His Majesty's
ships, whether belonging to a Dominion Fleet or to the Fleet of the
United Kingdom, should be the same. Further, as it is a _sine quâ non_
that successful action in time of war depends upon unity of command and
direction, the general discipline must be the same throughout the whole
Imperial service, and without this it would not be possible to arrange
for that mutual co-operation and assistance which would be
indispensable in the building up and establishing of a local naval force
in close connection with the Royal Navy. It has been recognised by the
Colonial Governments that, in time of war, the local naval forces should
come under the general directions of the Admiralty."

The Commonwealth of Australia representatives accepted in full the
proposals as set forth in the Admiralty memorandum. It was agreed that
the Australian Fleet unit thus constituted should form part of the
Eastern Fleet of the Empire, to be composed of similar units of the
Royal Navy, to be known as the China and the East Indies units
respectively, and the Australian unit.

The initial cost was estimated to be approximately:

 1 armoured cruiser (new _Indomitable_ class).        £2,000,000
 3 unarmoured cruisers (_Bristols_) at £350,000.       1,050,000
 6 destroyers (_River_ class) at £80,000                 480,000
 3 submarines (_C_ class) at £55,000                     165,000
                                                      ----------
                                              Total   £3,695,000

The annual expenditure in connection with the maintenance of the Fleet
unit, pay of personnel, and interest on first cost and sinking fund, was
estimated to be about £600,000, to which amount a further additional sum
would have to be added in view of the higher rates of pay in Australia
and the cost of training and subsidiary establishments, making an
estimated total of £750,000 a year.

The Imperial Government, until such time as the Commonwealth could take
over the whole cost, offered to assist the Commonwealth Government by an
annual contribution of £250,000 towards the maintenance of the complete
Fleet unit; but the offer was refused, and the Australian taxpayer took
on the whole burden at once.

Still not content, the Australian Government arranged for a British
Admiral of standing to visit the Commonwealth and report on its naval
needs. His report suggested the quick construction of a Fleet and of
docks, etc., involving an expenditure, within a very short time, of
£28,000,000. There was no grumbling at this from the Labour Party
Government then in power. "We have called in a doctor. We must take his
prescription," said one of the Australian Cabinet philosophically.

The Australian, so aggressive in his patriotism, so determined in his
warlike preparations, so fitted by heredity and environment for martial
exploits, is to-day the greatest factor in the Southern Pacific. His
aggressiveness, which is almost truculence, is a guarantee that the
British Empire will never be allowed to withdraw from a sphere into
which it entered reluctantly. It will be necessary to point out in a
future chapter how the failure, so far, of the Australian colonists to
people their continent adequately constitutes one of the grave dangers
to the British Power in the Pacific. That failure has been the prompting
for much criticism. It has led to some extraordinary proposals being
put forward in Great Britain, one of the latest being that half of
Australia should be made over to Germany as a peace offering! But, apart
from all failures and neglect of the past (which may be remedied for the
future: indeed are now in process of remedy), Australia is probably
potentially the greatest asset of the British race. Her capacity as a
varied food producer in particular gives her value. There is much talk
in the world to-day of "places in the sun." Claims founded on national
pride are put forward for the right to expand. Very soon there must be a
far more weighty and dangerous clamour for "places at table," for the
right to share in the food lands of the Earth. Populations begin to
press against their boundaries. Modern science has helped the race of
man to reach numbers once considered impossible. Machinery, preventive
medicine, surgery, sanitation, all have helped to raise vastly his
numbers. The feeding of these increasing numbers becomes with each year
a more difficult problem. Territories do not stretch with populations.
Even the comparatively new nation of the United States finds her food
supply and raw material supply tightening, and has just been checked in
an attempt to obtain a lien on the natural resources of the British
Dominion of Canada. Now, excluding manufactures, the 4½ million people
of Australia produce wealth from farm and field and mine to the total of
£134,500,000 a year. Those 4½ millions could be raised to 40 millions
without much lessening of the average rate of production (only mining
and forestry would be affected).

The food production possibilities of Australia make her of enormous
future importance. They make her, too, the object of the bitterest envy
on the part of the overcrowded, hungry peoples of the Asiatic littoral.
The Continent must be held by the British race. It would appear to be
almost as certain that it must be attacked one day by an Asiatic race.




CHAPTER VIII

NEW ZEALAND AND THE SMALLER BRITISH PACIFIC COLONIES


A thousand miles east of Australia is another aggressive young democracy
preparing to arm to the teeth for the conflict of the Pacific, and eager
to embark upon a policy of forward Imperialism on its own account: with
aspirations, indeed, to be made overlord of all the Pacific islands
under the British Flag.

New Zealand had a softer beginning than Australia, and did not win,
therefore, the advantages and disadvantages springing from the wild type
of colonists who gave to the Australian Commonwealth a sturdy
foundation. Nor has New Zealand the "Bush" conditions which make the
back-country Australian quite a distinct type of white man. On those hot
plains of Australia, cruel to a first knowledge, very rich in profit and
welcome to the man who learns their secrets, most potent of attraction
with familiarity and mastery, Nature exacts from man a resolute wooing
before she grants a smile of favour. But, once conquered, she responds
with most generous lavishness. In return, however, she sets her stamp
on the men who come to her favour, and they show that stamp on their
faces. Thin, wiry, with deep-set peering eyes, they suggest sun-dried
men. But whilst leaching out the fat and softness from them, Nature has
compensated the "Bush" Australians with an enduring vitality. No other
men, probably, of the world's peoples could stand such strain of work,
of hunger, of thirst. No men have finer nerves, greater courage. They
must dice with Death for their lives, time and again staking all on
their endurance, and on the chance of the next water-hole being still
unparched. This gives them a contempt of danger, and some contempt of
life, which shows in a cruel touch in their character.

Imagine a white man who, keeping all his education and maintaining his
sympathy with modern science and modern thought, withal reverts in some
characteristics to the type of the Bedouin of the desert, and you have
the typical Australian Bushman. He is fierce in his friendships, stern
in his enmities, passionately fond of his horse, so contemptuous of
dwellings that he will often refuse to sleep in them, Arabian in his
hospitality, fatalistic in his philosophy. He has been known to inflict
torture on a native whom he suspects of concealing the whereabouts of a
water-hole, and yet will almost kill himself to get help for a mate in
need. He is so independent that he hates working for a "boss," and will
rarely take work on wages, preferring to live as his own master, by
hunting or fossicking, or by undertaking contract work for forest
clearing.

There is material for a great warrior nation in these Bushmen, with
their capacity for living anyhow, their deadliness as shots, their
perfect command of the horse, their Stoic cruelty which would enable
them to face any hardship without flinching, and to inflict any revenge
without remorse.

New Zealand has not the "Bushman" type. But as some compensation, the
early New Zealand settlers had the advantage of meeting at the very
outset an effective savage. The Australian learned all his hardihood
from Nature; the New Zealand colonist had the Maori to teach him, not
only self-reliance but community reliance. Whilst Nature was very kind
to him, sparing the infliction of the drought, giving always a
reasonable surety of food, he was obliged to walk warily in fear of the
powerful and warlike Maori tribes. The phenomenon, so frequent in
Australia, of a squatter leading his family, his flocks, and his herds
out into the wilderness and fighting out there, alone, a battle with
Nature was rare in New Zealand. There the White settlers were forced
into groups by the fear of and respect for the Maoris. From the first
they knew the value of a fortified post. Until a very late period of
their history they saw frequently the uniforms of troops from Great
Britain helping them to garrison the towns against the natives.

As was the case with Australia, the British Empire was very reluctant to
assume control of New Zealand. Captain Cook, who annexed Australia in
1770, had visited New Zealand in 1769, but had not acquired it formally
for the British Crown. The same explorer returned to New Zealand several
years after. But from the date of his last departure, 1776, three
decades passed before any White settlement was attempted. In 1788 the
colonisation of Australia was begun, but it was not until 1814 that a
small body of Europeans left Sydney and settled in New Zealand. The Rev.
Samuel Marsden, who had been Chaplain to the Convict Colony of New South
Wales, was the leader of the band, and its mission was to Christianise
the natives. A little later the Wesleyan Church founded a Mission in the
same neighbourhood. In 1825 a Company was formed in London to colonise
New Zealand, and it sent away a band of pioneers in the ship _Rosanna_.
The wild mien of the natives so thoroughly frightened these colonists
that almost all of them returned to England. Desultory efforts at
settlement followed, small bands of British subjects forming tiny
stations at various points of the New Zealand coast, and getting on as
well as they might with the natives, for they had no direct protection
from the British Government, which was entirely opposed to any idea of
annexing the group. There was no fever for expansion in England at the
time. The United States had broken away. Canada seemed to be on the
point of secession. The new settlement in Australia promised little. But
the hand of the British Government was destined to be forced in the
matter, and, willy-nilly, Britain had to take over a country which is
now one of her most valued possessions.

Mr Edward Gibbon Wakefield was responsible for forcing on the British
Government the acquisition of New Zealand. The era was one of
philanthropy and keen thought for social reform in Great Britain. The
doctrines of the French Revolution still reverberated through Europe,
and the rights of humanity were everywhere preached to men confronted
with the existence of great social misery, which seemed to deny to the
majority of mankind even the degree of comfort enjoyed by animals.
Wakefield's remedy was the emigration of the surplus population of the
British islands--well, the British islands except Ireland, to which
country and its inhabitants Wakefield had an invincible antipathy. The
prospectus of the Company to colonise New Zealand stated:

"The aim of this Company is not confined to mere emigration, but is
directed to colonisation in its ancient and systematic form. Its object
is to transplant English society with its various graduations in due
proportions, carrying out our laws, customs, associations, habits,
manners, feelings--everything of England, in short, but the soil. We
desire so now to cast the foundations of the colony that in a few
generations New Zealand shall offer to the world a counterpart of our
country in all the most cherished peculiarities of our own social system
and national character, as well as in wealth and power."

In due time twelve ships carrying 1125 people sailed for New Zealand.
That was the beginning of a steady flow of emigrants mostly recruited by
various Churches, and settled in groups in different parts of the New
Zealand islands--members of the Free Church of Scotland at Otago, of the
Church of England at Canterbury, men of Devon and Cornwall men at New
Plymouth.

The British Government could hardly shake off all responsibility for
these exiles. But it did its best to avoid annexation, and even adopted
the remarkable expedient of recognising the Maoris as a nation, and
encouraging them to choose a national standard. The Maori Flag was
actually flown on the high seas for a while, and at least on one
occasion received a salute from a British warship. But no standard could
give a settled polity to a group of savage tribes. The experiment of
setting up "The Independent Tribes of New Zealand" as a nation failed.
In 1840, Great Britain formally took over the New Zealand islands from
the natives under the treaty of Waitangi, which is said to be the only
treaty on record between a white race and a coloured race which has been
faithfully kept to this day.

"This famous instrument," writes a New Zealand critic, "by which the
Maoris, at a time when they were apparently unconquerable, voluntarily
ceded sovereign rights over their country to Queen Victoria, is
practically the only compact between a civilised and an uncivilised race
which has been regarded and honoured through generations of
difficulties, distrust, and even warfare. By guaranteeing to the Maori
the absolute ownership of their patrimonial lands and the enjoyment of
their ancestral rights and customs, it enabled them to take their place
as fully enfranchised citizens of the British Empire, and to present the
solitary example of a dark race surviving contact with a white, and
associating with it on terms of mutual regard, equality and unquestioned
loyalty. The measure of this relationship is evident from the fact that
Maori interests are represented by educated natives in both houses of
the New Zealand Parliament and in the Ministry. The strict observance of
the Treaty of Waitangi is part and parcel of the national faith of the
New Zealanders, and a glorious monument to the high qualities of one of
the finest races of aboriginal peoples the world has ever seen."

The New Zealand colonists, having won the blessing of the British Flag,
were not well content. Very shortly afterwards we find Mr James Edward
FitzGerald writing to Wakefield, who was contemplating a trip to New
Zealand.

"After all, this place is but a village. Its politics are not large
enough for you. But there are politics on this side the world which
would be so. It seems unquestionable that in the course of a very few
years--sometimes I think months--the Australian colonies will declare
their independence. We shall live to see an Australasian Empire
rivalling the United States in greatness, wealth and power. There is a
field for great statesmen. Only yesterday I was saying, talking about
you, that if you come across the world it must be to Australia; just in
time to draw up the Declaration of Independence."

But that phase passed. New Zealand to-day emulates Australia in a
fervent Imperial patriotism, and at the 1911 Imperial Conference her
Prime Minister, Sir Joseph Ward, was responsible for the following
proposal which was too forward in its Imperialism to be immediately
acceptable to his fellow delegates:

"That the Empire has now reached a stage of Imperial development which
renders it expedient that there should be an Imperial Council of State,
with representatives from all the self-governing parts of the Empire, in
theory and in fact advisory to the Imperial Government on all questions
affecting the interests of his Majesty's Dominions oversea."

He urged the resolution on the following grounds:

(1) Imperial unity; (2) organised Imperial defence; (3) the equal
distribution of the burden of defence throughout the Empire; (4) the
representation of self-governing oversea Dominions in an Imperial
Parliament of defence for the purpose of determining peace or war, the
contributions to Imperial defence, foreign policy as far as it affects
the Empire, international treaties so far as they affect the Empire, and
such other Imperial matters as might by agreement be transferred to such
Parliament.

In advocating his resolution Sir Joseph Ward made an interesting
forecast of the future of the British nations whose shores were washed
by the Pacific. He estimated that if the present rate of increase were
maintained, Canada would have in twenty-five years from now between
30,000,000 and 40,000,000 inhabitants. In Australia, South Africa, and
New Zealand the proportionate increase could not be expected to be so
great, but he believed that in twenty-five years' time the combined
population of those oversea Dominions would be much greater than that of
the United Kingdom. Those who controlled the destinies of the British
Empire would have to consider before many years had passed the expansion
of these oversea countries into powerful nations, all preserving their
own local autonomy, all being governed to suit the requirements of the
people within their own territory, but all deeply concerned in keeping
together in some loose form of federation to serve the general interests
of all parts of the Empire.

At a later stage, in reply to Sir Wilfrid Laurier, Prime Minister of
Canada, Sir Joseph Ward indulged in an even more optimistic prophecy.
The United States, he said, had something like 100,000,000 people. The
prospective possibility of Canada for settlement purposes was not less
than that of the United States, and the Dominion was capable of holding
a population of 100,000,000 in the future. Australia also was capable of
holding a similar number, although it would necessarily be a great
number of years before that position was reached. South Africa, too,
could hold 100,000,000 people. It was no exaggeration to suggest that
those three Dominions were capable of holding 300,000,000 of people with
great comfort as compared with certain overcrowded countries. New
Zealand, in the opinion of many well-qualified men, could carry upwards
of 40,000,000 people with comparative ease and comfort.

But these figures are hardly scientific. Climatic and other
considerations will prevent Canada from reaching quite the same degree
of greatness as the United States. British South Africa could "hold"
100,000,000 people, but it could not support them on present
appearances. The possibilities of Australian settlement are difficult to
be exaggerated in view of the steady dwindling of the "desert" area in
the light of recent research and exploration, and of the fact that all
her area is blessed with a genial climate. New Zealand, to keep
40,000,000 people, would need, however, to have a density of 400 people
per square mile, a density surpassed to-day in Belgium and Holland but
not reached by Great Britain. A fairly conservative estimate of the
possibilities of the British Empire would allow it for the future a
white population of 200,000,000, of whom at least half would be grouped
near the shores of the Pacific. Presuming a British Imperial Federation
on Sir Joseph Ward's lines with such a population, and the mastery of
the Pacific would be settled. But that is for the future, the far
future.

Sir Joseph Ward, in the event, was not able to carry the Imperial
Conference with him, the majority of the delegates considering that the
time had not yet come for the organisation of an Imperial Federal
system. But it is possible that with the passing of time and the growth
of the population of the Dominions overseas, some such system may
evolve: and a British Empire Parliament may sit one day at Westminster,
at Vancouver or at Sydney. Certainly the likelihood is that the
numerical balance of the British race will shift one day from the
Atlantic to the Pacific.

Following Australia's example, New Zealand has adopted a system of
universal training for military service, but there are indications that
she will not enforce it quite so rigorously as her neighbour. In the
matter of naval defence, at the Conference of 1909 the New Zealand
attitude was thus defined by her Prime Minister:--

"I favour one great Imperial Navy with all the Overseas Dominions
contributing, either in ships or money, and with naval stations at the
self-governing Dominions supplied with ships by and under the control of
the Admiralty. I, however, realise the difficulties, and recognise that
Australia and Canada in this important matter are doing that which their
respective Governments consider to be best; but the fact remains that
the alterations that will be brought about upon the establishment of an
Australian unit will alter the present position with New Zealand.

"New Zealand's maritime interests in her own waters, and her dependent
islands in the Pacific would, under the altered arrangements, be almost
entirely represented by the Australian Fleet unit, and not, as at
present, by the Imperial Fleet. This important fact, I consider,
necessitates some suitable provision being made for New Zealand, which
country has the most friendly feeling in every respect for Australia and
her people, and I am anxious that in the initiation of new arrangements
with the Imperial Government under the altered conditions, the interests
of New Zealand should not be over-looked. I consider it my duty to point
this out, and to have the direct connection between New Zealand and the
Royal Navy maintained in some concrete form.

"New Zealand will supply a _Dreadnought_ for the British Navy as already
offered, the ship to be under the control of and stationed wherever the
Admiralty considers advisable.

"I fully realise that the creation of specific units, one in the East,
one in Australia, and, if possible, one in Canada, would be a great
improvement upon the existing condition of affairs, and the fact that
the New Zealand _Dreadnought_ was to be the flag-ship of the
China-Pacific unit is, in my opinion, satisfactory. I, however, consider
it is desirable that a portion of the China-Pacific unit should remain
in New Zealand waters, and I would suggest that two of the new "Bristol"
cruisers, together with three destroyers and two submarines, should be
detached from the China station in time of peace and stationed in New
Zealand waters; that these vessels should come under the flag of the
Admiral of the China unit; that the flagship should make periodical
visits to New Zealand waters; and that there should be an interchange in
the service of the cruisers between New Zealand and China, under
conditions to be laid down.

"The ships should be manned, as far as possible, by New Zealand officers
and men, and, in order that New Zealanders might be attracted to serve
in the Fleet, local rates should be paid to those New Zealanders who
enter, in the same manner as under the present Australian and New
Zealand agreement, such local rates being treated as deferred pay.

"The determination of the agreement with Australia has, of necessity,
brought up the position of New Zealand under that joint agreement. I
therefore suggest that on completion of the China unit, the present
agreement with New Zealand should cease, that its contribution of
£100,000 per annum should continue and be used to pay the difference in
the rates of pay to New Zealanders above what would be paid under the
ordinary British rate. If the contribution for the advanced rate of pay
did not amount to £100,000 per annum, any balance to be at the disposal
of the Admiralty.

"The whole of this Fleet unit to be taken in hand and completed before
the end of 1912, and I should be glad if the squadron as a whole would
then visit New Zealand on the way to China, leaving the New Zealand
detachment there under its senior officer."

From the difference between the naval arrangements of Australia and New
Zealand can be gathered some hints of the difference between the
national characteristics of the two young nations. Australia is
aggressively independent in all her arrangements: loyal to the British
Empire and determined to help its aims in every way, but to help after
her own fashion and with armies and navies recruited and trained by
herself. New Zealand, with an equal Imperial zeal, has not the same
national self-consciousness and is willing to allow her share of naval
defence to take the form of a cash payment. Probably the most effective
naval policy of New Zealand would be founded on a close partnership with
Australia, the two nations combining to maintain one Fleet. But that New
Zealand does not seem to desire. She is, however, content to be a
partner with Australia in one detail of military administration. The
military college for the training of officers at the Australian Federal
capital is shared with New Zealand. The present Prime Minister of
Australia, Mr Fisher, is taking steps towards securing a closer defence
bond with New Zealand.[4]

In an aspiration towards forward Imperialism, New Zealand is fully at
one with Australia. But she has the idea that the control of the
Southern Pacific, outside of the continent of Australia, is the right of
New Zealand, and dreams of a New Zealand Empire embracing the island
groups of Polynesia. It will be one of the problems of the future for
the British Power to restrain the exuberant racial pride of these South
Pacific nations, who see nothing in the European situation which should
interfere with a full British control of the South Pacific.

In addition to Australia and New Zealand, the British Empire has a
number of minor possessions in the South Pacific. In regard to almost
all of them, the same tale of reluctant acceptance has to be told. New
Guinea was annexed by the Colony of Queensland, anxious to set on foot a
foreign policy of her own, in 1883. The British Government repudiated
the annexation, and in the following year reluctantly consented to take
over for the Empire a third of the great island on condition that the
Australian States agreed to guarantee the cost of the administration of
the new possession. The Fiji Group was offered to Great Britain by King
Thakombau in 1859, and was refused. Some English settlers then began to
administer the group on a system of constitutional government under
Thakombau. It was not until 1874 that the British Government accepted
these rich islands, and then somewhat ungraciously and reluctantly,
influenced to the decision by the fact that the alternative was German
acquisition.

It was no affectation of coyness on the part of the successive British
Governments which dictated a refusal when South Pacific annexations were
mooted. Time after time it was made clear that the Home Country wanted
no responsibilities there. Yet to-day, as the result mainly of the
impulse of Empire and adventure in individual British men, the British
Flag flies over the whole continent of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand,
a part of New Guinea, Fiji, and the Ellice, Gilbert, Kermadec, Friendly,
Chatham, Cook, and many other groups. It is a strange instance of
greatness thrust upon a people.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] Since writing, in March 1912, there has been an attempt on the part
of the Australian Prime Minister to come to some closer naval
arrangement with New Zealand; and the attempt seems to promise to be
successful.




CHAPTER IX

THE NATIVE RACES


The native races of the South Pacific, with the possible exception of
the Maori, will have no influence in settling the destiny of the ocean.
Neither the Australian aboriginal nor the Kanaka--under which last
general title may be grouped all the tribes of Papua, the Solomons, the
New Hebrides and other Oceanic islands--will provide the foundation of a
nation. It is one of the curiosities of world-history that no great race
has ever survived which had its origin in a land south of the Equator.
From the earliest civilisations to the latest, there is not a single
instance of a people of the southern hemisphere exercising any notable
effect on the world's destinies. Sometimes there seems no adequate
reason for this. That Africa north of the Equator should have produced a
great civilisation, which was the early guide and instructor of the
European civilisations, may be explained in part by the curious
phenomenon of the Nile delta, a tract of land the irrigation of which at
regular intervals by mysterious natural forces prompted inquiry, and
suggested that all the asperities of Nature could be softened by effort.
(The spirit of inquiry and the desire for artificial comfort are the
great promptings to civilisation.) But it is difficult to understand why
in America the aboriginal Mexicans should have been so much more warlike
than the Peruvians or any other people in South America; and why the
West Pacific should wash with its northern waters the lands of two great
races, and with its southern waters flow past lands which, though of
greater fertility, remained almost empty, or else were peopled by
childlike races, careless of progress and keen only to enjoy the simple
happiness offered by Nature's bounty.

The Australian aboriginal race is rapidly dwindling: one of its
branches, that which populated the fertile and temperate island of
Tasmania, is already extinct. In Tasmania, reacting to the influence of
a mild and yet stimulating climate, a climate comparable with that of
Devon in England, but more sunny, the Australasian native had won to his
highest point of development. Apparently, too, he had won to his highest
possible point, for there is evidence that for many generations no
progress at all had been made towards civilisation. Yet that point was
so low in the stage of evolution that it was impossible for the poor
natives to take any part, either as a separate race, or by mingling
their blood with another race, in the future of the Pacific. The black
Australian is a primitive rather than a degraded man. Most ethnologists
have concluded that this black Australian is a Caucasian. Wallace
ascribes to him kinship with the Veddas and the Ainus of Asia. Stratz
takes the Australian as the prototype of all the races of man.
Schoetensack contends that the human race had its origin in the
Australian continent.

But, however dignified by ancestry, the Australian aboriginal was
pathetically out of touch with modern civilisation. He broke down
utterly at its advent, not so much because of his bad qualities as
because of his childishness. Not only were alcohol, opium and greed
strange to him, but also weapons of steel and horses and clothing. He
had never learnt to dig, to build, to weave. War organisation had not
been thought of, and his tribal fights were prodigal of noise but
sparing of slaughter. When the White Man came, it was inevitable that
this simple primitive should dwindle from the face of the earth. It is
not possible to hold out any hope for the future of the Australian
blacks. They can never emulate the Maoris of New Zealand, who will take
a small share in the building up of a nation. All that may be hoped for
is that their certain end will be kept back as long as is humanly
possible, and that their declining days will be softened by all
kindness. A great reserve in the Northern Territory--a reserve from
which the White population would be jealously excluded, and almost as
jealously the White fashions of clothing and house-building--holds out
the best hope for their future. It is comforting to think that the
Australian Government is now resolved to do all in its power for the
aboriginals. Indeed, to be just, authority has rarely lacked in
kindness of 

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/40305