Part 1 (1/2)
Problems of the Pacific.
by Frank Fox.
CHAPTER I
THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE
The Pacific is the ocean of the future. As civilisation grows and distances dwindle, man demands a larger and yet larger stage for the fighting-out of the ambitions of races. The Mediterranean sufficed for the settlement of the issues between the Turks and the Christians, between the Romans and the Carthaginians, between the Greeks and the Persians, and who knows what other remote and unrecorded struggles of the older peoples of its littoral. Then the world became too great to be kept in by the Pillars of Hercules, and Fleets--in the service alike of peace and war--ranged over the Atlantic. The Mediterranean lost its paramount importance, and dominance of the Atlantic became the test of world supremacy.
Now greater issues and greater peoples demand an even greater stage. On the bosom of the Pacific will be decided, in peace or in war, the next great struggle of civilisation, which will give as its prize the supremacy of the world. Shall it go to the White Race or the Yellow Race? If to the White Race, will it be under the British Flag, or the flag of the United States, or of some other nation? That is the problem of the Pacific.
Since Cortes first looked on the waters of the ocean from a peak in Darien, since Balboa of Castile waded into its waters and claimed them for the dominion of the King of Castile, events have rushed forward with bewildering haste to transfer the centre of the world's interest to the Pacific. Cortes in his day looked to a North Pacific coast inhabited by a few wandering Indians. (The powerful national organisation of Mexico had not extended its influence as far as the Pacific coast.) Now there stretch along that coast the Latin-American Power of Mexico, doomed, probably, to be absorbed before the great issue of Pacific dominance is decided, but having proved under Diaz some capacity for organisation; the gigantic Power of the United States with the greatest resources of wealth and material force ever possessed by a single nation of the world; and the st.u.r.dy young Power of Canada.
To the South, Cortes looked to a collection of Indian States, of which Peru was the chief, boasting a gracious but unwarlike civilisation, doomed to utter destruction at the hands of Spain. Now that stretch of Pacific littoral is held by a group of Latin-American nations, the possibilities of which it is difficult accurately to forecast, but which are in some measure formidable if Chili is accepted as a standard by which to judge, though, on the whole, they have shown so far but little capacity for effective national organisation.
Looking westward, Cortes in his day could see nothing but darkness. It was surmised rather than known that there lay the Indies, the kingdoms of the Cham of Tartary and the great Mogul, lands which showed on the horizon of the imagination, half real, half like the fantasy of a mirage. To-day the west coast of the Pacific is held by the European Power of Russia; by the aspiring Asiatic Power of j.a.pan, which within half a century has forgotten the use of the bow and the fan in warfare and hammered its way with modern weapons into the circle of the world's great Powers; by China, stirring uneasily and grasping at the same weapons which won greatness for j.a.pan; by a far-flung advance guard of the great Power of the United States in the Philippines, won accidentally, held grimly; by England's lonely outposts, Australia and New Zealand, where less than five millions of the British race hold a territory almost as large as Europe.
Sprinkled over the surface of the ocean, between East and West, are various fortresses or trading stations, defending interests or arousing cupidities. Germany and France are represented. The United States holds Hawaii, the key to the Pacific coast of North America, either for offence or defence. Great Britain has Fiji and various islets. The j.a.panese Power stretches down towards the Philippines with the recent acquisition of Formosa.
Here are seen all the great actors in European rivalry. Added to them are the new actors in world-politics, who represent the antagonism of the Yellow Race to the White Race. Before all is dangled the greatest temptation to ambition and cupidity. Who is master of the Pacific, who has the control of its trade, the industrial leaders.h.i.+p of its peoples, the disposal of its warrior forces, will be master of the world.
It is a problem not only of navies and armies (though with our present defective civilisation these are the most important factors): it is a problem also of populations and their growth, of industries, of the development of natural resources, of trade and commerce. The Pacific littoral is in part unpeopled, in part undeveloped, unorganised, unappropriated. Its Asiatic portion must change, it is changing, from a position which may be compared with that of j.a.pan fifty years ago to a position such as j.a.pan's to-day. Its American and Australian portion must develop power and wealth surpa.s.sing that of Europe. Under whose leaders.h.i.+p will the change be made? To discuss that question is the purpose of this book: and at the outset the lines on which the discussion will proceed and the conclusions which seem to be inevitable may be foreshadowed.
At one time Russia seemed destined to the hegemony of the Pacific. Yet she was brought to the Pacific coast by accident rather than by design.
Her natural destiny was westward and southward rather than eastward, though it was natural that she should slowly permeate the Siberian region. As far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (the Elizabethan epoch in Anglo-Saxon history), the curious celibate military organisation of the Cossacks had won much of Siberia for the Czars. But there was no dream then, nor at a very much later period, of penetration to the Pacific.
European jealousy of Russia, a jealousy which is explainable only with the reflection that vast size naturally fills with awe the human mind, stopped her advance towards the Mediterranean. In the north her ports were useless in winter. In the south she was refused a development of her territory which was to her mind natural and just. Thus thwarted, Russia groped in a blind way from the Siberian provinces which had been won by the Cossacks towards a warm-water port in Asia. At first the movement was southward and filled England with alarm as to the fate of India. Then it turned eastward, and in Manchuria and Corea this European Power seemed to find its destiny. But j.a.pan was able to impose an effective check upon Russian ambitions in the Far East. At the present moment Russia has been supplanted in control of the Asiatic seaboard by j.a.pan.
j.a.pan has everything but money to equip her for a bold bid for the mastery of the Pacific before the completion of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Europe has taught to j.a.pan, in addition to the material arts of warfare, a cynical faith in the moral value, indeed, the necessity, of war to national welfare. She considers that respect is only to be gained by war: that war with a European nation is an enterprise of small risk: that in short her experience with the Russian Fleet was fairly typical of war with any European Power. She believes that she has the most thoroughly efficient army and navy, considering their size, in the world; and has much to justify the belief.
This ambition and the warlike confidence of j.a.pan const.i.tute to-day a more important factor in the problem of the Pacific than her actual fighting strength. But the check to prompt decisive action on her part is that of poverty. j.a.pan is very poor. The last war, in spite of great gain of prestige, brought no gain of money. Its cost bled her veins white, and there was no subsequent transfusion in the shape of a Russian indemnity. Nor are the natural resources of j.a.pan such as to hold out much hope of a quick industrial prosperity. She has few minerals. Her soil is in the bulk wretchedly poor. From the territories control of which she has won in battle--Manchuria and Corea--she will reap some advantage by steadily ignoring the ”open door” obligation in trade, and by dispossessing the native peasantry. But it cannot be very great.
There is no vast natural wealth to be exploited. The native peasantry can be despoiled and evicted, but the booty is trifling and the cost of the process not inconsiderable since even the Corean will shoot from his last ditch.
j.a.pan is now seeking desperately a material prosperity by industrial expansion. A tariff and bounty system, the most rigid and scientific the world knows, aims to make the country a great textile-weaving, s.h.i.+p-building, iron-making country. The smallest sc.r.a.p of an industry is sedulously nurtured, and j.a.panese matches, j.a.panese soap, j.a.panese beer, penetrate to the markets of the outer world as evidence of the ambition of the people to be manufacturers. But when one explores down to bedrock, the only real bases for industrial prosperity in j.a.pan are a supply of rather poor coal and a great volume of cheap labour. The second is of some value in cheap production, but it is yet to be found possible to build up national prosperity on the sole basis of cheap labour. Further, with the growth of modernity in j.a.pan, there is naturally a labour movement. Doctrines of Socialism are finding followers: strikes are heard of occasionally. The j.a.panese artisan and coolie may not be content to slave unceasingly on wages which deny life all comfort, to help a method of national aggrandis.e.m.e.nt the purport of which they can hardly understand.
The position of j.a.pan in the Pacific has to be considered, therefore, in the light of the future rather than of the present. At the time of the conclusion of the war with Russia it seemed supreme. Since then it has steadily deteriorated. If she had succeeded in the realisation of her ambition to undertake the direction of China's military and industrial reorganisation, the j.a.panese Power would have been firmly established for some generations at least. But the defects in her national character prevented that. Inspiring no confidence among the Chinese, the j.a.panese found all attempts at peaceful a.s.sumption of a controlling influence in China checked by sullen antipathy; and a forced a.s.sumption would not have been tolerated by Europe. It will not be found possible, on a full survey of the facts, to credit j.a.pan with the power to hold a supreme place in the Pacific. She is, even now, among the dwindling Powers.
China, on the other hand, has the possibilities of a mighty future.
To-day she is in the throes of nation-birth. To-morrow she may unbind her feet and prepare to join in the race for supremacy. The bringing of China into the current of modern life will not be an easy task, but it is clearly not an impossible one. Before the outbreak of the present Revolution (which may place China among the democratic Republics of the world), the people of the Celestial Empire had begun to reconsider seriously their old att.i.tude of intolerance towards European civilisation. To understand fully the position of China it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the actual Chinese nation, some 400,000,000 of people, enervated as were the Peruvians of South America, by a system of theocratic and pacific Socialism, were subjected about 250 years ago to the sovereignty of the Manchus, a warrior race from the Steppes. Since then the Manchus have governed China, tyrannously, incompetently, on the strength of a tradition of military superiority stronger far than the _Raj_ by which the British have held India. But the Manchus--in numbers and in intellect far inferior to the Chinese--forgot in time their military enterprise and skill. The tradition of it, however, remained until the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed that the Manchu military power was contemptible not only against the white foreigner, but also against the j.a.panese _parvenu_. Patient China, finding her tyrant to be a weak despot, revolts now, not only against the Manchu dynasty, but also against the Conservatism which has kept her from emulating j.a.pan's success in the world.
At present the power of China in the Pacific is negligible. In the future it may be the greatest single force in that ocean. Almost certainly it may be reckoned to take the place of j.a.pan as the chief Asiatic factor.
j.a.pan and China having been considered, the rest of Asia is negligible as affecting the destiny of the Pacific except in so far as India can serve as basis of action for British power. An independent Indian nation is hardly one of the possibilities of the future. Religious, racial, and caste distinctions make a united, independent India at present impossible. Unless the British Power carries too far a tendency to conciliate the talking tribes of the Hindoo peninsula at the expense of the fighting tribes, it should hold India by right of a system of government which is good though not perfect, and by reason of the impossibility of suggesting any subst.i.tute. In the event of a failure of the British Power, India would still, in all probability, fail to take a place among the great nations of the earth. Either she would fall a victim to some other nation or relapse into the condition, near to anarchy, which was hers before the coming of the Europeans.
It is not possible to imagine to-day any European Power other than Great Britain--with the possible exception of Russia--becoming strongly established in the Pacific. France and Germany have footholds certainly.
But in neither case is the territory held by them possible of great development, and in neither case is there a chain of strategic stations to connect the Pacific colony with the Mother Country. The despatch of the German ”mailed fist” to Kiao-Chou in China some years ago is still remembered as one of the comic rather than the serious episodes of history. The squadron bearing to the Chinese the martial threat of the German Emperor had to beg its way from one British coaling station to another because of the lack of German ports.