The year 1904 logically marks the beginning of the development that, seventy years later, was to bring consternation to the whole world.  The Japanese-Russian War took place in 1904, and the historians of the time gravely noted it down that that event marked the entrance of Japan into the comity of nations.  What it really did mark was the awakening of China.  This awakening, long expected, had finally been given up.  The Western nations had tried to arouse China, and they had failed.  Out of their native optimism and race-egotism they had therefore concluded that the task was impossible, that China would never awaken.

What they had failed to take into account was this:  that between them and China was no common psychological speech.  Their thought-processes were radically dissimilar.  There was no intimate vocabulary.  The Western mind penetrated the Chinese mind but a short distance when it found itself in a fathomless maze.  The Chinese mind penetrated the Western mind an equally short distance when it fetched up against a blank, incomprehensible wall.  It was all a matter of language.  There was no way to communicate Western ideas to the Chinese mind.  China remained asleep.  The material achievement and progress of the West was a closed book to her; nor could the West open the book.  Back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness, in the mind, say, of the English-speaking race, was a capacity to thrill to short, Saxon words; back and deep down on the tie-ribs of consciousness of the Chinese mind was a capacity to thrill to its own hieroglyphics; but the Chinese mind could not thrill to short, Saxon words; nor could the English-speaking mind thrill to hieroglyphics.  The fabrics of their minds were woven from totally different stuffs.  They were mental aliens.  And so it was that Western material achievement and progress made no dent on the rounded sleep of China.

Came Japan and her victory over Russia in 1904.  Now the Japanese race was the freak and paradox among Eastern peoples.  In some strange way Japan was receptive to all the West had to offer.  Japan swiftly assimilated the Western ideas, and digested them, and so capably applied them that she suddenly burst forth, full-panoplied, a world-power.  There is no explaining this peculiar openness of Japan to the alien culture of the West.  As well might be explained any biological sport in the animal kingdom.

Having decisively thrashed the great Russian Empire, Japan promptly set about dreaming a colossal dream of empire for herself.  Korea she had made into a granary and a colony; treaty privileges and vulpine diplomacy gave her the monopoly of Manchuria.  But Japan was not satisfied.  She turned her eyes upon China.  There lay a vast territory, and in that territory were the hugest deposits in the world of iron and coal—­the backbone of industrial civilization.  Given natural resources, the other great factor in industry is labour.  In that territory was a population of 400,000,000 souls—­one quarter of the then total population of the earth.  Furthermore, the Chinese were excellent workers, while their fatalistic philosophy (or religion) and their stolid nervous organization constituted them splendid soldiers—­if they were properly managed.  Needless to say, Japan was prepared to furnish that management.