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It would probably be useless to attempt such an enterprise while Japan remains unembarrassed, but it would at once become feasible if Japan were at war with America or with Great Britain. There is therefore nothing improbable in the supposition that Russia may, within the next ten or twenty years, recover the position which she held in relation to China before the Russo-Japanese war.
Group I, which deals with the fruits of victory in Shantung, has little to detain us since events which have just unrolled there have already told the story of those demands. In Shantung we have a simple and easily-understood repeated performance of the history of 1905 and the settlement of the Russo-Japanese War.
Even so was I moved by the Bruges-like emptinesses of Pekin, in the vast pretensions of its Forbidden City, which are like a cry, long sustained, that at last dies away in a wail. I saw the place in 1905 in that slack interval after the European looting and before the great awakening that followed the Russo-Japanese war.
The Russo-Japanese War brought into sharp contrast a nation of limitless resources and fine human stock handicapped and crippled by a selfish bureaucracy, and a much smaller nation, inexperienced and remote from the great world currents, but strengthened and made efficient by an intelligent and patriotic administration.
It is indeed an unstable equilibrium, hard to maintain and easily upset. The latent instability of European political control over the Near and Middle East was dramatically shown by the moral effect of the Russo-Japanese War. Down to that time the Orient had been so helpless in face of European aggression that most Orientals had come to regard Western supremacy with fatalistic resignation.
Asia was moved from end to end, and the sleep of the centuries was finally broken. It was a time when it was 'good to be alive, for a new chapter was being written in the book of the world's history." Of course the Russo-Japanese War did not create this new spirit, whose roots lay in the previous epoch of subtle changes that had been going on.
Professor Ditman says, "Of 29,000,000 workers in the United States over 500,000 are yearly killed or crippled as a direct result of the occupations in which they are engaged more than were killed and wounded throughout the whole Russo-Japanese War. More than one-half this tremendous sacrifice of life is needless."
JAPANESE OFFICIAL HISTORY, translated in U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, July-August, September-October, 1914. The Russo-Japanese war greatly weakened Russia's position in Europe, and left the Dual Alliance of France and Russia overweighted by the military strength of the Teutonic Empires, Germany and Austria, whether or not Italy should adhere to the Triple Alliance with these nations.
During the nineteenth century she held her place against all rivals. With the assistance of Prussia, she overthrew Napoleon at Waterloo. In the Crimean War and the Russo-Japanese War she halted the power of the Czar. Half a century after Waterloo Germany, under the leadership of Prussia won the Franco-Prussian War, and by that act became the leading rival of the British Empire.
The Emperor had, no doubt, specially in mind the birth of the Anglo-French Entente and the war between Russia and Japan, both events forming the dominant factors of the political situation at this time. The Russo-Japanese War arose primarily from the unwillingness of Russia to evacuate Manchuria after the Boxer troubles in China. The incidents of the war are still fresh in public memory.
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