Outraged France was in arms.  She hurled fleet after fleet against the coast of China, and nearly bankrupted herself by the effort.  China had no navy.  She withdrew like a turtle into her shell.  For a year the French fleets blockaded the coast and bombarded exposed towns and villages.  China did not mind.  She did not depend upon the rest of the world for anything.  She calmly kept out of range of the French guns and went on working.  France wept and wailed, wrung her impotent hands and appealed to the dumfounded nations.  Then she landed a punitive expedition to march to Peking.  It was two hundred and fifty thousand strong, and it was the flower of France.  It landed without opposition and marched into the interior.  And that was the last ever seen of it.  The line of communication was snapped on the second day.  Not a survivor came back to tell what had happened.  It had been swallowed up in China’s cavernous maw, that was all.

In the five years that followed, China’s expansion, in all land directions, went on apace.  Siam was made part of the Empire, and, in spite of all that England could do, Burma and the Malay Peninsula were overrun; while all along the long south boundary of Siberia, Russia was pressed severely by China’s advancing hordes.  The process was simple.  First came the Chinese immigration (or, rather, it was already there, having come there slowly and insidiously during the previous years).  Next came the clash of arms and the brushing away of all opposition by a monster army of militia-soldiers, followed by their families and household baggage.  And finally came their settling down as colonists in the conquered territory.  Never was there so strange and effective a method of world conquest.

Napal and Bhutan were overrun, and the whole northern boundary of India pressed against by this fearful tide of life.  To the west, Bokhara, and, even to the south and west, Afghanistan, were swallowed up.  Persia, Turkestan, and all Central Asia felt the pressure of the flood.  It was at this time that Burchaldter revised his figures.  He had been mistaken.  China’s population must be seven hundred millions, eight hundred millions, nobody knew how many millions, but at any rate it would soon be a billion.  There were two Chinese for every white-skinned human in the world, Burchaldter announced, and the world trembled.  China’s increase must have begun immediately, in 1904.  It was remembered that since that date there had not been a single famine.  At 5,000,000 a year increase, her total increase in the intervening seventy years must be 350,000,000.  But who was to know?  It might be more.  Who was to know anything of this strange new menace of the twentieth century—­China, old China, rejuvenescent, fruitful, and militant!