t life,
the potency of vicinal location around this enclosed sea has been
suddenly restored. The enforced opening of the treaty ports of Japan,
Korea and China simply prepared the way for this basin to reassert its
power to unite, and to unite now more closely and effectively than
ever before, under the law of increasing territorial areas. The
stimulus was first communicated to the basin from without, from the
trading nations of the Occident and that new-born Orient rising from
the sea on the California shores. Japan has responded most promptly
and most actively to these over-sea stimuli, just as England has, of
all Europe, felt most strongly the reflex influences from
trans-Atlantic lands. The awakening of this basin has started,
therefore, from its seaward rim; its star has risen in the east. It is
in the small countries of the world that such stars rise. The
compressed energies of Japan, stirred by over-sea contact and an
improved government at home, have overleaped the old barriers and are
following the lines of slight resistance which this land-bound sea
affords. Helped by the bonds of geographical conditions and of race,
she has begun to convert China and Korea into her culture colonies.
The on-looking world feels that the ultimate welfare of China and
Korea can be best nurtured by Japan, which will thus pay its old debt
to the Middle Kingdom.

[Sidenote: Chinese expansion seaward.]

Despite the fact that China's history has always had a decidedly inland
character, that its political expansion has been landward, that it has
practiced most extensively and successively internal colonization, and
that its policy of exclusion has tended to deaden its outlook toward the
Pacific, nevertheless China's direct intercourse with the west and its
westward-directed influence have never, in point of significance, been
comparable with that toward the east and south. Here a succession of
marginal seas offered easy water-paths, dotted with way stations, to
their outermost rim in Japan, the Philippines and remote Australia.
About the South China Sea, the Gulf of Siam, the Sulu, Celebes, and Java
Seas, the coastal regions of the outlying islands have for centuries
received Chinese goods and culture, and a blend of that obstinately
assertive Chinese blood.

The strength of these influences has decreased with every increase of
distance from the indented coasts and teeming, seafaring population of
South China, and with every decrea