FOREIGN AGRESSIVENESS. 371 



had to be settled, and might, beneath whose brutal 

 sway treaties and agreements were scattered as chaff 

 before the wind, became sole arbiter, was nothing less 

 than disastrous to British commerce and prestige. 



France opened the ball by extracting China's signa- 

 ture to a treaty the provisions of which were in direct 

 contravention to those of an already existing agreement 

 between England and China ; but England was now a 

 negligible quantity as compared with the Russo-Franco- 

 German combination, and could be, and in fact was, 

 ignored. 



Eussia lost little time in making her presence felt. 

 A loan for £16,000,000, arranged for between China 

 and English capitalists, was peremptorily vetoed, and 

 the Chinese compelled to borrow from France, — Russia 

 herself, without any such request having been made 

 by China, standing security for the solvency of that 

 country ; and in 1896 she concluded an agreement 

 which prepared the way for carrying out her ambitious 

 programme of conquest by railway in Manchuria. The 

 acquisition of the warm -water port which was to con- 

 stitute the terminus of the railway was facilitated by 

 the high-handed action of Germany in seizing the 

 harbour of Kiao Chau, and in exacting official sanction 

 for her occupation of the Shan-tung Promontory after 

 she had done so, as well as by the extraordinary pro- 

 cedure of British statesmen at this critical period. 



The dramatic proceedings in connection with the Port 

 Arthur incident are of such recent occurrence, and are 

 so well known to all who have interested themselves in 

 Far Eastern affairs, as to make anything more than a 

 brief summary unnecessary. The first act opens with a 

 soliloquy by a British Cabinet Minister, gratuitously 

 informing the British public, in an audible aside, that 

 " so far from regarding with fear and jealousy a com- 



