An indiscreet chronicle from the Pacific

Front matter

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Contents

PART PAGE

I The Problem 1

II The Instrumentality of Canada ... 32

Part I The Problem

I HAVE lately come to the conclusion that the fundamental policy of the Tokugawa Shogunate (which was likewise the initial policy of the defunct Manchu dynasty) in forbidding in the Seventeenth Century in as absolute a manner as possible intercourse with Western countries was scientifically correct.

The Japanese were more thorough in their policy than the Chinese because they were then as now essentially a maritime people understanding the importance of the sea, and much given to the pursuit of ideas to their logical conclusion without regard for the ultimate consequences. They had for hundreds of years prior to the prohibition wandered in their shipping over a goodly part of the Eastern arms of the Pacific Ocean, and captured by piratical assault coast towns in Northern and Central China, harbours in the Philippine archipelago, and prahus in the Straits of Malacca. Regulations made in the Ming dynasty (Fourteenth to Seventeenth Century)

prescribe very minutely the number of persons who might accompany Japanese embassies to Nanking, the old Southern capital, because it was always feared by the Court that bands of swordsmen might be concealed in such corteges, who would not hesitate to attempt a coup de mam if the odds seemed in their favour. It is an interesting historical fact that the failure of the Mongol invasions of Japan in the Thirteenth Century led to a great outburst of piracy and raiding on the part of Japanese. The men of five centuries ago had therefore almost precisely the same characteristics as to-day; the modifications which have taken place are infinitesimal; and it will be interesting to watch whether they will in the end react to foreign economic pressure much as they finally did to foreign cultural and military superiority in the early Tokugawa period.

The Chinese were less drastic in their prohibition because they were (and still are) not only philosophic but creatures of a curiously contradictory compound. A friend from the southern provinces who has reflected long on the matter, constantly declares to me that their nature is a mixture of the cynic and epicurean; they have a contempt for human nature and yet at one and the same time are much given to sensual enjoyment. This estimate seems to me just because on no other basis can their marvellous and splendid art be reconciled with the rather sordid background of their daily lives. It was not in them to reject the West in the manner the Japanese did immediately they believed that that gesture was requisite to secure their own institutions. That seemed too extreme for them, no matter how ugly European conquest might be. European historians have been much given to describing in glowing terms the effects which the Turkish capture of Constantinople and the loss of the old land-routes to the East had on the progress of the Western races. They have never ceased proclaiming that the white man, victoriously bursting his bonds and sailing round Africa, Asia, and the Americas, by his sea-mastery conquered the world in the space of half a century, and vastly benefited humanity. How the cultured Asiatic felt about the assault on his domains is a matter which has not attracted much attention, although Mr. H. G. Wells in his Outline of History has almost for the first time in the cast of any Western writer taken more adequate views.

The Japanese walled themselves in against Europe, leaving open only a tiny window at Deshima in tihe harbour of Nagasaki to which Dutch traders came once a year, because fear had gained them. Spanish galleons, wrecked on their shores, had shown them as in a glass darkly what the famous infantry of Alva might mean to them, and how impossible it would be to resist a great expeditionary force if Western cupidity were thoroughly aroused. There was undoubtedly in the Japanese brain a memory of the great Mongol armadas of the Thirteenth Century, which had succeeded in effecting a landing on Japanese soil and had only been destroyed, much as the Spanish Armada to England was destroyed, by great storms. Other points which must have influenced policy were the success of the Korean admirals in burning the Japanese fleets during the Hideyoshi Expedition, and a growing conviction that Western firearms (shown them by the Portuguese and Spanish) were a handicap which they could not surmount.

But allied to this was another fear, far more insidious since it postulated the war of ideas, a fear which is again to-day in new forms heavily assaulting them. Christianity, in the person of those immortals whose accoimts of early Japan, like their accounts of early China, remain deKghtful prose poems, had not only knocked at the doors of the country, but achieved astonishing success. Great daimyos had listened and believed and had been baptized. The wearing of the scapula was beginning to be fashionable. The little-known and uncompleted history of the Japanese people by Murdoch, a monumental work, has to be read in order to understand the vast commotion in Japanese society. The Japanese nature, always dramatic and intense, seemed on the point of achieving something new and remarkable in a manner totally unknown in the East. . . .

The closing of Japan by the Shogunate was thus a double gesture: there was the outward and visible slam of the door to keep out aliens, and the inward .and secret act which ironed out dissidents. The curlous Japanese type, created by a racial fusion which is by no means yet clear, and which has in it undoubtedly very contradictory elements, had been temporarily saved. Japanese culture, obtained from China by way of Korea a thousand years previously and hammered into the amalgam of race by slow processes, became even more stereotyped than before. The old order of society, based on monastic orders and feudalism and traditional observances, was such a nice balance that to hold it in place seclusion was plainly necessary. Had the Shogunate been cancelled by maintaining the open door and permitting the constant entiy of zealous missionaries, not to speak of the traders with their arquebuses,, it is almost certain that Japanese history would have resembled the history of Asia Minor before Arab and Turk destroyed the Norman kingdoms on the Mediterranean. The Christian daimyos, who fought in the Korean expedition of 1596 with cries of "Maria" under banners adorned with the Cross, might have been .the founders of Catholic principalities on the shores of the Inland Sea. . . .

II

The action of the Chinese, while based on the same general principle, was curiously different in its detail. The Manchus had inherited most of their foreign policy from the Ming dynasty, just as the Republic of China has inherited most of its foreign policy from the Manchus. The Ming dynasty had no very settled ideas on the subject of foreigners until Portuguese mariners in the Sixteenth Century began to behave atrociously in the coast towns of Southern China and sallied forth and provided themselves with virgins whom they spirited away to their ships. This led to fierce reprisals and the destruction of the early settlements. Eventually Macao — a tiny town in the Canton estuary — became the sole legal residence; and it is a curious commentary on the vagueness and indifference which characterize foreign affairs that even to-day the Macao question is unsettled in certain particulars.

Meanwhile the Chinese, being essentially commercial-minded, evolved at Canton a special machinery based on the close corporation idea, which standardized the exchange of goods at the seasons set by the trade winds and allowed fleets of vessels to come and go. Their own great junks still sailed down to Singapore as they had done in Marco Polo's day, trans-shipping their cargo and getting new freight without such regard for Western activities; whereas the Japanese made the building of sea-going vessels a death offence. The Chinese had the same religious problem as the Japanese; but they were indifferent in the matter until a clear ruling from the Pope made the authority of the Church override the authority of the emperors. Then it was that by Imperial Edict the custom of ancestor-worship destroyed the power of Propaganda; and that the religious door was slammed to as in Japan.

With the Nineteenth Century the chances of maintaining the scientificially correct policy of exclusion diminished to vanishing point (scientifically correct because it preserved and fostered the type of culture evolved by native genius). The civilization of the extreme East was at last to meet its inevitable Nemesis in the machine-made civilization of the extreme West. There has been a good deal of renown won by Commodore Perry for his so-called opening of Japan: but it is necessary to observe that China had been "opened" eleven years previously and that the waters of the Pacific and the Yellow Sea were being ploughed by countless foreign keels. Sailing vessels had been seen passing down the coast of Japan in hundreds ; many had been wrecked and their crews made captive. The policy of seclusion was failing, sapped by the sea-tides, precisely as if it had been a castle of sand. . . .

The motives which prompted the American initiative in this matter appear to have been mixed. I have discovered nothing in any pubhshed account of a very convincing nature. No doubt the British Treaty of Nanking made with China in 1842 exerted a great deal of influence: so did events taking place in what are to-day the Pacific Coast States. The cession of California and the settlement of Oregon certainly seemed to demand a more vigorous policy further afield. President Wilson with his doctrine of the freedom of the seas was inventing nothing new ; for there is at the back of American consciousness a sort of sea instinct, not as strong as the English instinct, yet closely resembling it, and tending always to give importance to maritime action. For the reason I am inclined to believe that the advance of British traders clear round Asia to the very mouth of the Yangtze river — ^which was the gi'eat accomplishment of 1842 — prompted Perry's action more than anything else, although the rescue of shipwrecked crews and the needs of the Pacific trade were the public reasons. Significally enough, Perry used Hongkong as his base, American foreign policy always tending to use England as its starting-point. . . .

Presently Korea was "opened" and soon the impact had become more or less stereotyped. The Western world could now dump its excess production on the foreshores of a large number of open ports and receive back quantities of raw or semi-raw products. The rest was more or less on the knees of the gods. What effect this exchange was having on the minds of the populations: what shape destiny would give their hopes and fears — above all their fears — these things were not for officialdom.

We thus reach the period of the Nineties and the war which inevitably came between the two "opened" countries, China and Japan, about the third "opened" country, Korea. All was inevitable; for the banishment of seclusion and exclusion brought China and

Japan back to precisely the same point where they had been when they left off quarrelling prior to the fall of the Ming dynasty.

Japan had learnt something about soldiers and navies; China considerably less. The result was a Japanese victory.

But there was a much more important circttmstance. With the collapse of China the immense corruption of Russian imperiahsm had at last reached the Far East in force by the land-route. Russia had been nibbling for a generation: now she opened her mouth and bit hard. The balance of power was not only changed by this event, but history inevitably took a new road far away from the sea-lanes which had until now monopolized attention. The greatest importance must be attached to this dislocation which has no parallel in the annals of the East, and to which is directly due practically all world disturbance during the last quarter of a century.

Of all Powers the United States was the one which understood the implications of this vast modification the least. Placed in possession of the Philippines by chance and in the Hawaiian Islands by deliberate act, she still maintained the fiction of the aloofness practised by her for a century. Yet of all the Powers she was the one that had the oldest Pacific relations with Russia. Books written sixty and seventy years ago are filled with the activities of Americans and bear witness to their old-time success. Long before there was any question of the Alaska purchase, Russia and America almost joined hands across the Northern Pacific, American whalers and schooners being the vanguard of the maritime advance.

But in the interval between the Alaska purchase (1867) and the Treaty of Shimonoseki (1895) a great change had come. The sailing-ship days were over and in the first age of steamers Americans did not excel. The zone of interest had also crept southwards. Hawaii and the Philippines had become the symbols of policy — not Alaska and the Aleutians. It was a British fleet which occupied the Korean anchorage. Port Hamilton, in 1885 because Russia looked hke moving south, although, logically, it should have been an American fleet since America had opened Korea in the Perry style only three years previously and had proclaimed unalterable principles. Even in China American policy was purely negative, taking the form of altruistic declarations. There was a very definite pause as men tried to take stock of the vast struggle now going on between the century old maritime policy and the new Russian policy of land grab.

The signature of the Anglo-Japanese Treaty in 1902 was a declaration that sea-power tends naturally to work along certain lines. It was the most important event in China since 1842 because Japan was still essentially a sea-power, not yet turned by continentalism into something harder to define. The challenge which Russia offered was so obvious that it was necessary to meet it or else the sea-lanes would be closed.

The Russo-Japanese war put Japan back where she had tentatively been in 1895, with the valuable addition of railways. It is from this moment that the modern history of the Far East commences. All the forces which are still working were then set in motion, moving with a steadfastness which is a fair promise of their permanence. The problem of integrating Chinese national life in such a way as to be an effective international element had necessarily become greatly complicated. It was only men of strong minds who could see that in spite of vastly increased detail the outline remained essentially the same.

Ill

In Peking, long before the world-war, we had reached the conclusion that there were only two countries important to the New China. They were important not so much because of what they might directly do, but because the future in the Far East hinged on whether or not their views were identical and their influence directed along the same channels towards the same ends. The relationship of England to America — that indeed was the supreme factor! No matter how you might look at it there was not one of the other Powers that had any true liberty of action or that could by any possible combination radically influence the march of events. Russia had compromised her whole future by her rashness in the post-Boxer period. Germany, separated by ten thousand miles from the scene of action, had after an initial outburst of disruptive energy in 1898 and 1900 settled down to a motherly policy which had won for her the confidence of the Chinese. France had interests so small that they were not seriously to be counted. Let us remember that it was these three Powers who combined together in 1895 against Japan in the Liaotung intervention — Russia, Germany, and France.

Remains Japan.

Japan, in spite of her victories in 1894-95 and 1904-05, still possessed little that made for permanent greatness. Her geographical isolation was perhaps a factor ; but internationally that had a negative as well as a positive side; for it put her out of communion with the world. The machine-made age had indeed touched her and enlisted her in its ranks; yet essentially she remained unchanged. Her national life was based as in the remote past on primitive agriculture and the fisheries and the handicrafts : and whenever her factories were idle the men went back to the land and the coast and the small shops and worked as if the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries had brought no change. Iron and steel and scientific accomplishment had increased her armaments; but the fa9ade of Westernism was not very tough, and in a true conflict of exhaustion the same things would come to the surface as in the earlier centuries — fierce battle valour, a posture of defence, retirement. . . . One circumstance and one only qualified this. This was the existence of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance which has played the same part in Japanese national life as the Declaration of Independence in ^ the life of the American people. So immense has been its influence in changing Japan's relationship with the world that exaggerated as the sentence above may sound it is hardly the whole truth. Japan had not possessed independence in the sense that Western Powers understood it until the Alliance gave it to her. She had been dispossessed of the Liaotung by a mere gesture on the part of three Powers and she had been intrigued out of Korea by one Power alone — ^Russia. She could never have fought this Power without the protection of the Alliance. Even as it was ruin was so close to her when the war was stopped that it was calculated to be exactly five months off. The real instrument of peace was not the treaty signed at Portsmouth on the 2nd September, 1905, but the second Anglo-Japanese Alhance of the 12th August signed in London. The whole framework of her Western relationship, being purely artificial, was held up and supported not by what she could do herself, but what she could get others to assist her in doing. This is a pregnant sentence which every student should nail to his desk. No men understood this better than Japanese statesmen; this is precisely why Japan's future, like China's, hinges on how England and America act.

Japan's Korean-Manchurian policy, with its curious attempts to find sanctions which would meet the approval of the resident populations and lead them to endorse foreign-style legal agreements entered into for international reasons, began badly to frighten the Far East long before the world-war: and whilst it would be an overstatement to declare that the Chinese Revolution of 1911 was directly due to Japanese policy that Revolution would have been impossible without the humiliations which had been imposed on China by Japan.

The British, being like the Chinese essentially a commercial-minded people, were troubled by the rise of a commercial rival. But policy in England is conducted on the plan of the Insurance Office. Good risks, when they have been wilhngly written, are continued because that is the essence of sound business, and because a contrary attitude would seem unconservative and rash. Japan had carried out the letter of her contract: and since it is not usual for statesmen to inquire about things of the spirit, the rest was a matter which could only be unofficially condemned.

In 1911 the British had done a remarkable thing — signed the third Anglo-Japanese Alliance four years before the second instrument had expired, ostensibly because, in the language of the preamble, changes had occurred necessitating a revision of the text. In reality it was another matter which forced action. The supreme factor in the Far East had begun to loom up in a new way : the relationship of England to America was troubling statesmen. The movement towards arbitration treaties was a symptom of a need which was deeply felt in order to eliminate risks which had become perilously hazardous. The insertion of the arbitration article (Article IV) was agreed upon, although not at all popular with the Japanese. But that was all. The old insurance firm would not yet admit the existence of a world in which a complete abandonment of an established system was advisable. The proof of this was afforded by the whole action which began in 1914 to which very close attention should be re-directed.

ly

British policy has historically thought of Asia on a strictly mercantilist basis. Asia is a region where there are markets, not peoples. This connotes the existence of certain common necessities and leads to a certain kind of action, but nothing else. The markets must be supplied with cloth, iron, machinery and what-not; the markets must send back their raw and semi-raw products. Nothing must be allowed to interfere with this exchange or prejudice it. But that ideas should penetrate in company with the cloth, iron, machinery and what-not and have a most powerful repercussion, leading to aspirations, temptations, irritations and aspersions, is if not an irreverence at least not in accordance with precept.

In 1914 there was a document in existence — the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. It was destined to do for China the greatest disservice any foreign agreement had performed at any time in her history.

Germany in the Far East, as I have already pointed out, was popular because her policy for a number of years had been more liberal and less mercantilist than the policy of any other Power. Several years before the outbreak of war her action in the sphere of Chinese railways had been decisive in breaking down a persistent and malevolent attempt to alienate control from the Chinese people and place it in the hands of foreign syndicates. In business and diplomacy she was accommodating and sympathetic, showing that she understood something of the psychological problem which was before the peoples of the East from the necessity of scrapping their own civilization and substituting alien ideas. Although she was a member of the Banking consortiimi she had taken little or no part in the politico-financial action of the Legations in the previous year — 1913 — ^which by means of an international loan had destroyed the Parliament of the Republic to which they were accredited.

President Yuan Shih-kai was actually engaged in conversations having for object the surrender of the Kiaochow Lease, as soon as the German cruisers commenced their raiding in the China Seas. But the conversations had led nowhere not so much because full powers were not possessed by the German representatives, but because of the advice and action of the British Minister. Had Britain, in the person of the British Minister, made an absolute offer to support China if she turned out the Germans by force unless Kiaochow was immediately surrendered, there would have been instant action, and all history would have been different. The same communication should have been made to China as to Japan. I have the authority of all the secretaries and personnel of the late President Yuan Shih-kai for the statement that China was dissuaded from either quickly completing her negotiations or taking the necessary military action because of advice tendered her under the guise of friendship. The complete failure to grasp the great possibilities which a belligerent China held out for a solution of the Far Eastern question in 1914 was due to the fact that the men of the spot were not only inadequate but did not deal fairly and honourably with a friendly power.

Yet England was represented in Peking by an exemplary official with every possible qualification, except imagination and a knowledge of world affairs. A member of the China Consular service long before he had been made British Minister, Sir John Jordan was perfectly acquainted with every aspect of Chinese life and highly sympathetic with the Chinese people. Liberal-minded and just, he had completed in the last years of his service a piece of noble work by forcing through in the teeth of bitter opposition the total abolition of the Indian opium trade, a traffic which had been a source of disgrace for more than a century. Nevertheless, in spite of these qualities, he was totally unsuited for the crisis which arose. Deeply occupied with routine work, he could not conceive of a disorderly issue such as war arising suddenly out of the night. What stirred and occupied him was contraventions of the commercial Treaties which he looked upon as more important than the fate of nations. Venerating the Foreign Office, in a way which might have even embarrassed the late George Downing, he had come to look upon any interruption of the time-honoured method of reporting and receiving instructions as a sign of Divine displeasure.

Yet he had the situation in the hollow of his hand. Fate had willed that in the days of his youth he had -been a contemporary of Yuan Shih-kai's in Seoul, living through long and stormy years with him when Korea's fate was at stake. His influence with the man was very great ; there was nothing that he could not get him to do. The establishment of the Republic in China had largely come through his advocacy of compromise at a moment when decision in another sense would have kept the Manchus on the Throne. The very next year, without ever suspecting that he was guilty of something worse than inconsistency, he had assisted the virtual overthrow of the Republic and the rise of the open dictatorship of Yuan Shih-kai by forcing through a foreign loan against the will of Parliament. Like many mild men, a believer in the strong man theory because he had heard so many people speak approvingly of it, he nevertheless had few ideas on the subject, and always hoped for the best even when his actions were producing the worst.

Such was the man on the spot who in the summer of 1914 was called upon to play a decisive role in a matter as disorderly as a world-war.

What did he do? He carefully and zealously watched other people act and reported the facts by telegraph from hour to hour. The one important thing was to get a firm grasp of all the undertakings between China and Germany; to watch them both; and to show London (by telegraph) how the Treaties might affect the issue. All his influence with Yuan Shih-kai, all his friendship for China, all the immense possibilities of the situation were forgotten; he merely carried out his duty according to his lights.

What took place? In Dr. E. J. Dillon's book on the Paris Peace negotiations there is an account which has been checked with official documents and found to be substantially correct, and which shows in a sufficiently precise way the information and advice which reached London from Peking.

Dr. Dillon says:

"The day before Britain declared war against Germany the British Ambassador at Tokyo officially Inquired whether his Government could count upon the active co-operation of the Mikado's forces in the campaign about to begin. On August 4th Baron Kato, having in the meanwhile consulted his colleagues, answered in the affirmative. Three days later another communication reached Tokyo from London, requesting the immediate co-operation of Japan, and on the following day it was promised. The motive for this haste was credibly asserted to be Britain's apprehension lest Germany should transfer Kiao Chow to China, and reserve to herself, * in virtue of Article V of the Convention of 1898, the right of securing after the war 'a more suitable territory' in the Middle Empire or Republic. Thereupon they began operations which were at first restricted to the China Seas, but were afterwards extended to the Pacific and Indian Oceans, and finally to the Mediterranean. The only task that fell to their lot on land was that of capturing Kiao Chow."

Here you have in all its nakedness the terrible error of August, 1914. Not the fate of civilization, not the victory of one group of Powers devoted to proclaimed objects, not national security were matters of concern in China, but apprehension concerning the possibilities contained in Article V of the Sino-German Convention of 1898 ! Never has official stupidity shown itself so glaringly. China, who could have been brought into the war at the very outset with England on midnight of the 4th August 1914, and contributed (after the occupation of Kiao Chow) a powerful army for the Mesopotamian and Near Eastern campaigns was rebuffed and deliberately kept out, being almost driven into the opposite camp through the action of Japan, taken at the request of ' England, advised to that end by her minister in Peking. Her troops, who might have won for her excellent renown abroad, were left to fester in the country so that they could gradually destroy all unity. Nor was the folly coniined to astounding aberration at the beginning of the war; no attempt was made almost until the end to utilize Chinese resources. Although the dockyards of Hongkong and Shanghai almost all belong to British companies, and could have turned out annually 200,000 tons of new shipping, official action in spite of every effort was so supine that nothing was done until the effort was of no importance. One million tons of new vessels were therefore as deliberately thrown away as if the Germans had sunk them. Had Germany possessed England's position and resources in China it would have meant for her the difference between defeat and victory. That a heavy responsibility attaches to every one who participated in this conspiracy of inaction is to-day not disputed.

Because it had meant for them a secret and unnecessary betrayal, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance became enthroned as an object of open hatred in the hearts of the Chinese people. After having been in existence twelve years, it had directly meddled with Chinese affairs in a most disastrous way and had directly influenced not only the march of events throughout the world but the chances of Chinese domestic peace. For with the mandate given to Japan over the matter of Shantung, the Japanese took every advantage, from the Twenty-one Demands of 1915 down to their uncompromising stand of Paris in 1919. The survival of the wholly incorrect idea that the Chinese cannot be utilized in world politics, except as hewers of wood and carriers of water in Labour Corps, was at the bottom, of a mistake which the world will continue to pay for during long and painful years.