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The feat was arduous and the masterly way in which it was tackled and achieved sheds a luster on Japanese statesmanship as personified by Viscount Motono. The Tsardom, in lieu of a potential enemy, was transformed into a stanch and powerful friend and ally, on whom Nippon could, as she believed, rely against future aggressors.
On February 19th, Baron Motono sent a communication to the French and Russian Ambassadors stating, among other things, that "the Imperial Japanese Government proposes to demand from Germany at the time of the peace negotiations, the surrender of the territorial rights and special interests Germany possessed before the war in Shantung and the islands belonging to her situated north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean."
But in order that that guidance should be effective it must be accepted, and this can only be the consequence of such a policy of cordiality, patience, and magnanimity as was outlined by my friend, the late Viscount Motono. At the Conference the policy of the Japanese delegates was clear-cut and coherent.
From Tokyo came the assurance of Viscount Motono, Japanese Foreign Minister, that Japan had received no proposal from either Germany or Mexico for an alliance against the United States. He scouted the idea as ridiculous, since it was based on the "outrageous presumption that Japan would abandon her allies."
M. Izvolsky's policy toward Japan, frank and statesman-like, had an offensive and a defensive alliance for its intended culmination, and the treaties and conventions which he actually concluded with Viscount Motono, in drafting which I played a modest part, amounted almost to this.
Motono and his address at a small hotel close by and who volunteered the explanation that he was temporarily short of cash until a remittance arrived, had borrowed five pounds from him on a pearl tie-pin which he had drawn from his cravat. That was Yada, without a doubt but from that point Yada vanished.
He said also that Motono, the Japanese Ambassador, is far the finest politician here; and he told me that while Russia ought to have been protecting the road to Constantinople she was quarrelling about what its new name was to be, and had decided to call it "Czareska." Now, I suppose, the Germans are already there.
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