weak, and the utter impotence of all ethical
considerations in the face of armed force, with a crude nakedness which
few Eastern military conquerors could well have surpassed.

"The great cosmic event in the history of the last quarter of a century
has been the awakening of Asia after centuries of somnolence. The East
has suddenly sprung to life, and endeavoured to throw itself vigorously
into the full current of Western progress. Japan started the enterprise;
and, fortunately for herself, she entered upon it before the new Western
policy had fully developed itself, and while certain archaic ideals
about the rights of peoples and the sanctity of treaties still
prevailed. When the new era was inaugurated by the great Japanese
statesmen of the nineteenth century, Europe did not feel called upon to
interfere. We regarded the Japanese renaissance with interest and
admiration, and left the people of Nippon to work out the difficulties
of their own salvation, unobstructed. If that revolution had taken place
thirty years later, there would probably have been a different story to
tell; and New Japan, in the throes of her travail, would have found the
armed Great Powers at her bedside, each stretching forth a mailed fist
to grab something worth taking. Other Eastern countries which have
endeavoured to follow the example of Japan during the present century
have had worse luck. During the past ten years a wave of sheer
materialism and absolute contempt for international morality has swept
across the Foreign Offices of Europe, and has reacted disastrously upon
the various Eastern nations in their desperate struggles to reform a
constitutional system. They have been attempting to carry out the
suggestions made to them for generations by benevolent advisers in
Christendom.

"Now, when they take these counsels to heart, and endeavour, with
halting steps, and in the face of immense obstacles, to pursue the path
of reform, one might suppose that their efforts would be regarded with
sympathetic attention by the Governments of the West; and that, even if
these offered no direct aid, they would at least allow a fair trial."
But, on the contrary, "one Great Power after another has used the
opportunity presented by the internal difficulties of the Eastern
countries to set out upon a career of annexation."[86]

We have already seen how rapid was this career of annexation,
extinguishing the independence of the last remaining Mohammedan stat