Page:A Short History of the World.djvu/403

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European Aggression in Asia 383 in the prospective looting of Manchuria and China, and they would suffer no withdrawal. So there began a transportation of great armies of Japanese soldiers across the sea to Port Arthur and Korea, and the sending of endless trainloads of Russian peasants along the Siberian railway to die in those distant battlefields. The Russians, badly led and dishonestly provided, were beaten on A STREET IN TOKIO sea and land alike. The Russian Baltic Fleet sailed round Africa to be utterly destroyed in the Straits of Tshushima. A revolutionary .movement among the common people of Russia, infuriated by this remote and reasonless slaughter, obliged the Tzar to end the war (1905) ; he returned the southern half of Saghalien, which had been seized by Russia in 1875, evacuated Manchuria, resigned Korea to Japan. The European invasion of Asia was coming to an end and the retraction of Europe's tentacles was beginning.