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THE RUSSO-JAPANESE WAR

The war between Japan and Russia was inevitable, because, as already pointed out in this volume,[1] the two countries represented different and naturally hostile interests. Ever since Russia, shut out from an open port on the European or Western Asiatic seaboard, began to spread eastward through Asia to seek an outlet into the Pacific Ocean, it had been inevitable that the two powers would some day come into collision. And it can be confidently affirmed that the Russians did nothing, while Japan had done much, to avert the conflict. Russia not infrequently committed overt acts to provoke Japan, and had generally treated the latter in an overbearing and insolent manner.

In 1875, Japan was forced to give up Sakhalin for the bleak and barren Kurile Islands. It was just twenty years later (1895) that Russia committed her most unjust act of interference and provocation. Japan, after her successful conflict with China, by the treaty of Shimonoseki, had obtained the cession of the Liaotung Peninsula, of which Port Arthur was then the most important port. "Hardly was the ink dry on it [treaty] before the three great European powers—Russia, France, and Germany—stepped in, and, in order to justify their interference, declared that any holding of Manchurian territory by Japan would constitute a menace to the peace of Asia."[2] Japan, exhausted by her first foreign war under the new

  1. ↑ Pages 299-300.
  2. ↑ Baron Kaneko at Harvard University.
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