of Autocracy or Despotism, is the reason most frequently assigned as the cause of war. Under tutelage of the press, and burdened by the traditions of education framed for the encouragement of nationalist sentiment, all nations reason in the same fashion. No matter the form of government, whatever the extent of political or social liberty won by the democracy, in the first flush of war the nation persuades itself that it fights for freedom. In this sense freedom is universally understood to mean the right of a people to determine its own method of government and develop its industrial resources. All organs of opinion, the Press, Parliament, the Pulpit, exert their utmost power to convince the nation that it fights, first for self-preservation, and secondly to destroy a foreign Power menacing the world's peace.
RUSSIA AND JAPAN.
The war between Russia and Japan arose from Russia's refusal to abide by her undertaking to evacuate the southern part of Manchuria. Russia tore up her treaty obligations because a section of Russian financiers wished to resist the advance of Japanese trade and influence in Manchuria and Korea. In his Memoirs, General Kuropatkin explains that in the territory through which the River Yalu flows, in Northern Korea, a financial group at the Russian Court had established a vast timber enterprise. For centuries Korea, a small kingdom on the eastern coast of Asia, was a vassal state of China. With the rise of Japanese power it was agreed with China, that neither country should send troops into Korea without the consent of the other. In 1894 there was a rising in Korea, generally understood to be the result of certain political manœuvres by Japan. Immediately, Japanese troops were despatched to Korea, and the kingdom declared independent of China. In 1896 the Emperor of Korea, no longer able to resist the Japanese pressure in the administration and the financial control of his diminutive kingdom, sought refuge in the Russian Legation at Seoul. There he met one Bezobrazoff, an intimate of the Czar, to whom, in return for a promise of Russian protection, the Emperor granted a concession to the Russian capitalists, authorising them to exploit the timber resources of the Yalu district. General Kuropatkin relates that the late Czar had investments in the company formed to work the concession, amounting to not less than £200,000.
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