Japan and the Pacific And a Japanese View of the Eastern Question

Without doubt the Pacific will in the coming century be the platform of commercial and political enterprise. This truth, however, escapes the eyes of ninety-nine out of a hundred, just as did the importance of Eastern Europe in 1790, and of Central Asia in 1857. In the former case England did not appreciate the danger of a Russian aggression of Turkey, and so Pitt’s intervention in the Turkish Question failed. It was otherwise in the second half of the nineteenth century, when the Crimean War and the Berlin Congress proved great events in English history. In 1857 the national feeling in England was not aroused as to the importance of defending Persia from foreign attack. Lord Palmerston had written to Lord Clarendon, Feb. 17, 1857, “It is quite true, as you say, that people in general are disposed to think lightly of our Persian War, that is to say, not enough to see the importance of the question at issue.” How strongly does the Afghan question attract the public attention of England at the present day?

It is very evident that in 1857 very few in England were awake to the vital importance of withstanding Russian inroads into the far East, viz., the Pacific.

After defeating Russia miserably in the Crimean War and driving her back at the Balkans by the Treaty of Paris, Lord Palmerston’s mind was now revolving and discussing the following serious thought: “Where would Russia stretch out her hands next?”

I think I am not wrong in stating the following as Lord Palmerston’s solution of the problem:—

(a) That Russia was about to strike the English interests at Afghanistan by an alliance with Persia.

(b) That she would attack the Afghan frontier single-handed.

(c) That an alliance would be formed with the Chinese, and a combined hostility against Britain would be shown by both.

(d) She would extend her Siberian territory to the Pacific on the north, thereby obtaining a seaport on that ocean’s coast, and make it an outpost for undermining English influence in Southern China.

Therefore in 1856 Lord Palmerston declared war against Persia remarking that “we are beginning to reveal the firstopenings of trenches against India by Russia.”

This policy proved a winning one. The Indian Mutiny of 1857, however, scarcely gave Palmerston time to mature his Afghan Frontier scheme, consequently his views with regard to that country were to a great extent frustrated by Russia.

In the autumn of 1856, the Arrow dispute gave Palmerston his long-wished for opportunity of gaining a stronghold in the South China Sea. He declared war on China. The causes of this dispute on the English side were morally unjust and legally untenable. Cobden brought forward a resolution to this effect—that “The paper laid on the table failed to establish satisfactory grounds for the violent measure resorted to.” Disraeli, Russell, and Graham all supported Cobden’s motion. Mr. Gladstone, who was also in favour of the motion, said, at the conclusion of his speech, “with every one of us it rests to show that this House, which is the first, the most ancient, and the noblest temple of freedom in the world, is also the temple of that everlasting justice without which freedom itself would only be a name, or only a curse, to mankind. And I cherish the trust that when you, sir, rise in your place to-night to declare the numbers of the division from the chair which you adorn, the words which you speak will go forth from the halls of the House of Commons as a message of British justice and wisdom to the farthest corner of the world.”

Mr. Gladstone, it certainly seems to me, only viewed the matter from a moral point of view. If we look at it in this light, then the British occupation of Port Hamilton was a still more striking example of English “loose law and loose notion of morality in regard to Eastern nations.”

Palmerston was defeated in the House by sixteen votes, but was returned at the general election by a large majority backed by the aggressive feelings of the English nation.

He contended that “if the Chinese were right about the Arrow, they were wrong about something else; if legality did not exactly justify violence, it was at any rate required by policy.” He described this policy in the following way—“To maintain the rights, to defend the lives and properties of British subjects, to improve our relations with China, and in the selection and arrangement of those objects to perform the duty which we owed to the country.”