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Manchuria's awful lesson teaches you, young man, that the profession of arms, dreadful as it is honorable, holds out to you all the possibilities by which every great captain of history made his name immortal.
If it be asked why, apart from history and national sentiment, Japan should object to Russia in Korea, the answer is, first, because there would thus be planted almost within cannon-shot of her shores a power of enormous strength and traditional ambition; secondly, because whatever voice in Manchuria's destiny Russia derived from her railway, the same voice in Korea's destiny was possessed by Japan, as the sole owner of the railways in the Korean peninsula; thirdly, that whereas Russia had an altogether insignificant share in the foreign commerce of Korea and scarcely ten bona fide settlers, Japan did the greater part of the oversea trade and had tens of thousands of settlers; fourthly, that if Russia's dominions stretched uninterruptedly from the sea of Okhotsk to the Gulf of Pehchili, her ultimate absorption of northern China would be inevitable, and fifthly, that such domination and such absorption would involve the practical closure of all that immense region to the commerce and industry of every Western nation except Russia.
In the still closeness of a forty below zero climate in the dead of winter, the silent stream of white clad figures creeps over the icy mountain passes, in groups of tens, twenties and fifties, seeking a new world of subsistence, willing to take a chance of life and death in a hand-to-hand struggle with the stubborn soil of Manchuria's wooded and stony hillsides.
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