germinating half-unconsciously in millions of Oriental minds, and was
thus the sign manual of the whole nexus of forces making for a
revivified Orient.

Furthermore, this new temper profoundly influenced the Orient's
attitude toward the series of fresh European aggressions which then
began. It is a curious fact that just when the Far East had
successfully resisted European encroachment, the Near and Middle East
should have been subjected to European aggressions of unparalleled
severity. We have already noted the furious protests and the unwonted
moral solidarity of the Moslem world at these manifestations of Western
_Realpolitik_. It would be interesting to know exactly how much of this
defiant temper was due to the heartening example of Japan. Certainly
our ultra-imperialists of the West were playing a dangerous game during
the decade between 1904 and 1914. As Arminius Vambery remarked after
the Italian raid on Tripoli: "The more the power and authority of the
West gains ground in the Old World, the stronger becomes the bond of
unity and mutual interest between the separate factions of Asiatics,
and the deeper burns the fanatical hatred of Europe. Is it wise or
expedient by useless provocation and unnecessary attacks to increase
the feeling of animosity, to hurry on the struggle between the two
worlds, and to nip in the bud the work of modern culture which is now
going on in Asia?"[109]

The Great War of course immensely aggravated an already critical
situation. The Orient suddenly saw the European peoples, who, in racial
matters, had hitherto maintained something like solidarity, locked in an
internecine death-grapple of unparalleled ferocity; it saw those same
peoples put one another furiously to the ban as irreconcilable foes; it
saw white race-unity cleft by moral and political gulfs which white men
themselves continuously iterated would never be filled. The one
redeeming feature of the struggle, in Oriental eyes, was the liberal
programme which the Allied statesmen inscribed upon their banners. But
when the war was over and the Allies had won, it promptly leaked out
that at the very time when the Allied leaders were making their liberal
speeches they had been negotiating a series of secret treaties
partitioning the Near East between them in a spirit of the most cynical
imperialism; and in the peace conferences that closed the war it was
these secret treaties, not the liberal speeches, which determined the
Orie