gave Japan much of her own civilization, should be stamped under foot in such manner, the course which politics have taken in Korea has been disastrous in the extreme ever since Lord Lansdowne in 1905, as British Secretary for Foreign Affairs, pointed out in a careful dispatch to the Russian Government that Korea was a region which fell naturally under the sway of Japan.  Not only has a tragic fate overcome the sixteen million inhabitants of that country, but there has been a covert extension of the principles applied to them to the people of China.

Now if as we say European concepts are to have universal meaning, and if Japan desires European treatment, it is time that it is realized that the policy followed in Korea, combined with the attempt to extend that treatment to soil where China rightly claims undisputed sovereignty, forms an insuperable barrier to Japan being admitted to the inner council of the nations.[31] No one wishes to deny to Japan her proper place in the world, in view of her marvellous industrial progress, but that place must be one which fits in with modern conceptions and is not one thing to the West and another to the East.  Even the saying which was made so much of during the Russian war of 1904, that Korea in foreign hands was a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan—­has been shown to be inherently false by the lessons of the present struggle, the Korean dagger-point being 120 sea miles from the Japanese coast.  Such arguments clearly show that if the truce which was hastily patched up in 1905 is to give way to a permanent peace, that can be evolved only by locking on to the Far East the principles which are in process of being vindicated in Europe.  In other words, precisely as Poland is to be given autonomy, so must Korea enjoy the same privileges, the whole Japanese theory of suzerainty on the Eastern Asiatic Continent being abandoned.  To re-establish a proper balance of power in the Far East, the Korean nation, which has had a known historical existence of 1,500 years, must be reinstated in something resembling its old position; for Korea has always been the keystone of the Far Eastern arch, and it is the destruction of that arch more than anything else which has brought the collapse of China so perilously near.

Once the legitimate aspirations of the Korean people have been satisfied, the whole Manchurian-Mongolian question will assume a different aspect, and a true peace between China and Japan will be made possible.  It is to no one’s interest to have a Polish question in the Far East with all the bitterness and the crimes which such a question must inevitably lead to; and the time to obviate the creation of such a question is at the very beginning before it has become an obsession and a great international issue.  Although the Japanese annexation may be held to have settled the question once and for all, we have but to point to Poland to show that a race can pass through every possible humiliation and endure every possible species of truncation without dying or abating by one whit its determination to enjoy what happier races have won.