During the session of 1904 Lord Lansdowne made praiseworthy efforts to
call their attention to the misgovernment of the Congo State; but he met
with no response except from the United States, Italy, and Turkey(!) A
more signal proof of the weakness and cynical selfishness now prevalent
in high quarters has never been given than in this abandonment of a
plain and bounden duty.

A slight amount of public spirit on the part of the signatories of the
Berlin Act would have sufficed to prevent Congolese affairs drifting
into the present highly anomalous situation. That land is not Belgian,
and it is not international--except in a strictly legal sense. It is
difficult to say what it is if it be not the private domain of King
Leopold and of several monopolist-controlling trusts. Probably the only
way out of the present slough of despond is the definite assumption of
sole responsibility by the Belgian people; for it should be remembered
that a very large number of patriotic Belgians urgently long to redress
evils for which they feel themselves to be indirectly, and to a limited
extent, chargeable. At present, those who carefully study the evidence
relating to the Berlin Conference of 1885, and the facts, so far as they
are ascertainable to-day, must pronounce the Congo experiment to be a
terrible failure.

CHAPTER XX

RUSSIA IN THE FAR EAST

"This war, waged . . . for the command of the waters of the
Pacific Ocean, so urgently necessary for the peaceful
prosperity, not only of our own, but of other nations."--_The
Czar's Proclamation of March 3, 1905_.

Of all the collisions of racial interests that have made recent history,
none has turned the thoughts of the world to regions so remote, and
events so dramatic in their intensity and momentous in their results, as
that which has come about in Manchuria. The Far Eastern Question is the
outcome of the expansion of two vigorous races, that of Russia and
Japan, at the expense of the almost torpid polity of China. The struggle
has taken place in the debatable lands north and west of Korea, where
Tartars and Chinese formerly warred for supremacy, and where
geographical and commercial considerations enhance the value of the most
northerly of the ice-free ports of the Continent of Asia.

In order to understand the significance of this great struggle, we must
look back to the earlier stages of the extension of Russian influence.
Up to a very recent perio