96 HISTORY OF GREECE, ROME, AND ASIA 



Great Britain the possession of the Indies, threatened only as of yore 

 by the northwestern invaders. Three lucky campaigns have given 

 Burmah to England, already master of the greater part of the Malay 

 Peninsula. 



The treaty signed by Great Britain at Nanking in August, 1842, 

 broke up the Chinese barrier; the various Powers followed in emula- 

 tion the example of England; the United States, France, Belgium, 

 Sweden and Norway, by turn signed treaties or conventions with 

 the Son of Heaven. At that time England was truly without a rival 

 in the Far East, but was not far-sighted enough; the pledge she took 

 at Hong Kong, important as it was, was but a small one with regard 

 to the hopes of the future. England gave back to the Chinese the 

 Chusan Islands, which had been in her hands, as the French returned 

 the Pescadores after the settlement of the Tonquin question; of 

 course, loyal and honest acts, but also acts of improvident politics. 



To-day England has lost the unique situation she held sixty years 

 ago. In all the peoples of the world, she has found eager competitors 

 anxious to share with her the prey of which for a long time she 

 was alone covetous, alone capable of making the necessary effort to 

 grasp it firmly. 



France, which had formerly but a moral interest in the Far East, 

 that of the Catholic missions, has now a solid ground of action, as 

 a consequence of the conquest she made of the oriental part of Indo- 

 China, while England subdued the western coast of this peninsula. 



The colonization or the conquest by European nations tends to 

 diminish, to restrict, and especially to modify in Indo-China the 

 effect of the pacific or military invasions of Hindus and of the Sons 

 of Han. The struggle in Indo-China is limited to-day to two cham- 

 pions; the Chinese and the foreigner, wherever he comes from 

 England, France, or even Japan. The native, capable of slight or 

 passive resistance only, will have in the scale but the weight of his 

 master, who may not be of his own choice. 



However, the two facts dominating the political history of the Far 

 East during the last fifty years are the spread of the Russian power 

 through Asia on the one hand, and the revolution and the trans- 

 formation of the Japanese Empire on the other. 



During the reign of Ivan IV, in the middle of the sixteenth cen- 

 tury, to the east of the Ural Mountains began this tremendous 

 march of the Russians which drove them beyond the sea, since the 

 authority of the Tsar was formerly extended to this side of the 

 Straits of Behring; indeed, it was but in 1867 that the Russian 

 possessions in America, Alaska, were acquired by the United States. 

 The unification of the states of Great Russia, the conquest of the 

 Tartar Kingdoms of Kazan (1552) and of Astrakhan (1554), removed 



