Problems of the Pacific Part 1

Problems of the Pacific.

by Frank Fox.

CHAPTER I

THE OCEAN OF THE FUTURE

The Pacific is the ocean of the future. As civilisation grows and distances dwindle, man demands a larger and yet larger stage for the fighting-out of the ambitions of races. The Mediterranean sufficed for the settlement of the issues between the Turks and the Christians, between the Romans and the Carthaginians, between the Greeks and the Persians, and who knows what other remote and unrecorded struggles of the older peoples of its littoral. Then the world became too great to be kept in by the Pillars of Hercules, and Fleets--in the service alike of peace and war--ranged over the Atlantic. The Mediterranean lost its paramount importance, and dominance of the Atlantic became the test of world supremacy.

Now greater issues and greater peoples demand an even greater stage. On the bosom of the Pacific will be decided, in peace or in war, the next great struggle of civilisation, which will give as its prize the supremacy of the world. Shall it go to the White Race or the Yellow Race? If to the White Race, will it be under the British Flag, or the flag of the United States, or of some other nation? That is the problem of the Pacific.

Since Cortes first looked on the waters of the ocean from a peak in Darien, since Balboa of Castile waded into its waters and claimed them for the dominion of the King of Castile, events have rushed forward with bewildering haste to transfer the centre of the world's interest to the Pacific. Cortes in his day looked to a North Pacific coast inhabited by a few wandering Indians. (The powerful national organisation of Mexico had not extended its influence as far as the Pacific coast.) Now there stretch along that coast the Latin-American Power of Mexico, doomed, probably, to be absorbed before the great issue of Pacific dominance is decided, but having proved under Diaz some capacity for organisation; the gigantic Power of the United States with the greatest resources of wealth and material force ever possessed by a single nation of the world; and the st.u.r.dy young Power of Canada.

To the South, Cortes looked to a collection of Indian States, of which Peru was the chief, boasting a gracious but unwarlike civilisation, doomed to utter destruction at the hands of Spain. Now that stretch of Pacific littoral is held by a group of Latin-American nations, the possibilities of which it is difficult accurately to forecast, but which are in some measure formidable if Chili is accepted as a standard by which to judge, though, on the whole, they have shown so far but little capacity for effective national organisation.

Looking westward, Cortes in his day could see nothing but darkness. It was surmised rather than known that there lay the Indies, the kingdoms of the Cham of Tartary and the great Mogul, lands which showed on the horizon of the imagination, half real, half like the fantasy of a mirage. To-day the west coast of the Pacific is held by the European Power of Russia; by the aspiring Asiatic Power of j.a.pan, which within half a century has forgotten the use of the bow and the fan in warfare and hammered its way with modern weapons into the circle of the world's great Powers; by China, stirring uneasily and grasping at the same weapons which won greatness for j.a.pan; by a far-flung advance guard of the great Power of the United States in the Philippines, won accidentally, held grimly; by England's lonely outposts, Australia and New Zealand, where less than five millions of the British race hold a territory almost as large as Europe.

Sprinkled over the surface of the ocean, between East and West, are various fortresses or trading stations, defending interests or arousing cupidities. Germany and France are represented. The United States holds Hawaii, the key to the Pacific coast of North America, either for offence or defence. Great Britain has Fiji and various islets. The j.a.panese Power stretches down towards the Philippines with the recent acquisition of Formosa.

Here are seen all the great actors in European rivalry. Added to them are the new actors in world-politics, who represent the antagonism of the Yellow Race to the White Race. Before all is dangled the greatest temptation to ambition and cupidity. Who is master of the Pacific, who has the control of its trade, the industrial leaders.h.i.+p of its peoples, the disposal of its warrior forces, will be master of the world.

It is a problem not only of navies and armies (though with our present defective civilisation these are the most important factors): it is a problem also of populations and their growth, of industries, of the development of natural resources, of trade and commerce. The Pacific littoral is in part unpeopled, in part undeveloped, unorganised, unappropriated. Its Asiatic portion must change, it is changing, from a position which may be compared with that of j.a.pan fifty years ago to a position such as j.a.pan's to-day. Its American and Australian portion must develop power and wealth surpa.s.sing that of Europe. Under whose leaders.h.i.+p will the change be made? To discuss that question is the purpose of this book: and at the outset the lines on which the discussion will proceed and the conclusions which seem to be inevitable may be foreshadowed.

At one time Russia seemed destined to the hegemony of the Pacific. Yet she was brought to the Pacific coast by accident rather than by design.

Her natural destiny was westward and southward rather than eastward, though it was natural that she should slowly permeate the Siberian region. As far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (the Elizabethan epoch in Anglo-Saxon history), the curious celibate military organisation of the Cossacks had won much of Siberia for the Czars. But there was no dream then, nor at a very much later period, of penetration to the Pacific.

European jealousy of Russia, a jealousy which is explainable only with the reflection that vast size naturally fills with awe the human mind, stopped her advance towards the Mediterranean. In the north her ports were useless in winter. In the south she was refused a development of her territory which was to her mind natural and just. Thus thwarted, Russia groped in a blind way from the Siberian provinces which had been won by the Cossacks towards a warm-water port in Asia. At first the movement was southward and filled England with alarm as to the fate of India. Then it turned eastward, and in Manchuria and Corea this European Power seemed to find its destiny. But j.a.pan was able to impose an effective check upon Russian ambitions in the Far East. At the present moment Russia has been supplanted in control of the Asiatic seaboard by j.a.pan.

j.a.pan has everything but money to equip her for a bold bid for the mastery of the Pacific before the completion of the Panama Ca.n.a.l. Europe has taught to j.a.pan, in addition to the material arts of warfare, a cynical faith in the moral value, indeed, the necessity, of war to national welfare. She considers that respect is only to be gained by war: that war with a European nation is an enterprise of small risk: that in short her experience with the Russian Fleet was fairly typical of war with any European Power. She believes that she has the most thoroughly efficient army and navy, considering their size, in the world; and has much to justify the belief.

This ambition and the warlike confidence of j.a.pan const.i.tute to-day a more important factor in the problem of the Pacific than her actual fighting strength. But the check to prompt decisive action on her part is that of poverty. j.a.pan is very poor. The last war, in spite of great gain of prestige, brought no gain of money. Its cost bled her veins white, and there was no subsequent transfusion in the shape of a Russian indemnity. Nor are the natural resources of j.a.pan such as to hold out much hope of a quick industrial prosperity. She has few minerals. Her soil is in the bulk wretchedly poor. From the territories control of which she has won in battle--Manchuria and Corea--she will reap some advantage by steadily ignoring the "open door" obligation in trade, and by dispossessing the native peasantry. But it cannot be very great.

There is no vast natural wealth to be exploited. The native peasantry can be despoiled and evicted, but the booty is trifling and the cost of the process not inconsiderable since even the Corean will shoot from his last ditch.

j.a.pan is now seeking desperately a material prosperity by industrial expansion. A tariff and bounty system, the most rigid and scientific the world knows, aims to make the country a great textile-weaving, s.h.i.+p-building, iron-making country. The smallest sc.r.a.p of an industry is sedulously nurtured, and j.a.panese matches, j.a.panese soap, j.a.panese beer, penetrate to the markets of the outer world as evidence of the ambition of the people to be manufacturers. But when one explores down to bedrock, the only real bases for industrial prosperity in j.a.pan are a supply of rather poor coal and a great volume of cheap labour. The second is of some value in cheap production, but it is yet to be found possible to build up national prosperity on the sole basis of cheap labour. Further, with the growth of modernity in j.a.pan, there is naturally a labour movement. Doctrines of Socialism are finding followers: strikes are heard of occasionally. The j.a.panese artisan and coolie may not be content to slave unceasingly on wages which deny life all comfort, to help a method of national aggrandis.e.m.e.nt the purport of which they can hardly understand.

The position of j.a.pan in the Pacific has to be considered, therefore, in the light of the future rather than of the present. At the time of the conclusion of the war with Russia it seemed supreme. Since then it has steadily deteriorated. If she had succeeded in the realisation of her ambition to undertake the direction of China's military and industrial reorganisation, the j.a.panese Power would have been firmly established for some generations at least. But the defects in her national character prevented that. Inspiring no confidence among the Chinese, the j.a.panese found all attempts at peaceful a.s.sumption of a controlling influence in China checked by sullen antipathy; and a forced a.s.sumption would not have been tolerated by Europe. It will not be found possible, on a full survey of the facts, to credit j.a.pan with the power to hold a supreme place in the Pacific. She is, even now, among the dwindling Powers.

China, on the other hand, has the possibilities of a mighty future.

To-day she is in the throes of nation-birth. To-morrow she may unbind her feet and prepare to join in the race for supremacy. The bringing of China into the current of modern life will not be an easy task, but it is clearly not an impossible one. Before the outbreak of the present Revolution (which may place China among the democratic Republics of the world), the people of the Celestial Empire had begun to reconsider seriously their old att.i.tude of intolerance towards European civilisation. To understand fully the position of China it is necessary to keep in mind the fact that the actual Chinese nation, some 400,000,000 of people, enervated as were the Peruvians of South America, by a system of theocratic and pacific Socialism, were subjected about 250 years ago to the sovereignty of the Manchus, a warrior race from the Steppes. Since then the Manchus have governed China, tyrannously, incompetently, on the strength of a tradition of military superiority stronger far than the _Raj_ by which the British have held India. But the Manchus--in numbers and in intellect far inferior to the Chinese--forgot in time their military enterprise and skill. The tradition of it, however, remained until the events of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries showed that the Manchu military power was contemptible not only against the white foreigner, but also against the j.a.panese _parvenu_. Patient China, finding her tyrant to be a weak despot, revolts now, not only against the Manchu dynasty, but also against the Conservatism which has kept her from emulating j.a.pan's success in the world.

At present the power of China in the Pacific is negligible. In the future it may be the greatest single force in that ocean. Almost certainly it may be reckoned to take the place of j.a.pan as the chief Asiatic factor.

j.a.pan and China having been considered, the rest of Asia is negligible as affecting the destiny of the Pacific except in so far as India can serve as basis of action for British power. An independent Indian nation is hardly one of the possibilities of the future. Religious, racial, and caste distinctions make a united, independent India at present impossible. Unless the British Power carries too far a tendency to conciliate the talking tribes of the Hindoo peninsula at the expense of the fighting tribes, it should hold India by right of a system of government which is good though not perfect, and by reason of the impossibility of suggesting any subst.i.tute. In the event of a failure of the British Power, India would still, in all probability, fail to take a place among the great nations of the earth. Either she would fall a victim to some other nation or relapse into the condition, near to anarchy, which was hers before the coming of the Europeans.

It is not possible to imagine to-day any European Power other than Great Britain--with the possible exception of Russia--becoming strongly established in the Pacific. France and Germany have footholds certainly.

But in neither case is the territory held by them possible of great development, and in neither case is there a chain of strategic stations to connect the Pacific colony with the Mother Country. The despatch of the German "mailed fist" to Kiao-Chou in China some years ago is still remembered as one of the comic rather than the serious episodes of history. The squadron bearing to the Chinese the martial threat of the German Emperor had to beg its way from one British coaling station to another because of the lack of German ports.

The influence of South America in the Pacific need not yet be calculated. It is a possible far-future factor in the problem; and the completion of Trans-Andine railways may quickly enhance the importance of Chili and Peru. But for the present South America can take no great part in the Pacific struggle.

It is when British influence and American influence in the Pacific come to be considered that the most important factors in the contest for its supremacy enter upon the stage. Let us consider, for the nonce, the two Powers separately.

The British Empire--holding Australia and New Zealand with an audacious but thin garrison; having a long chain of strategic stations such as Hong Kong and Singapore; having in India a powerful rear base for supplies; holding a great part of the North-West Coast of America with a population as yet scanty but beginning to develop on the same lines as the Australasian people--is clearly well situated to win and to hold the mastery of the Pacific. Such mastery would have to be inspired with peaceful ideals; it could not survive as an aggressive force. It is indeed the main strength of the British position in the Pacific that it is naturally anxious, not for a disturbance but for a preservation of the present state of things, which gives to the British Empire all that a reasonable ambition could require. It is wise and easy to be peaceable when one has all the best of the spoils.

For a secure British mastery of the Pacific, India would need to be held with the military a.s.sistance of South Africa and Australia, and made a great naval base; Australia and New Zealand would need to be populated seriously; Canada would need to be guarded against absorption by the United States and its new population kept as far as possible to the British type; the friends.h.i.+p and co-operation of the United States would need to be sought.

Turning next to the United States it will be recognised that she has in a realised form all the force and wealth possible to an organised China or a fully developed Australia. She has one hundred million people, who have reached the highest stage of civilised organisation. Their material wealth--and wealth counts for much in modern war--is almost incalculable. Their national ambition has never been checked by defeat.

Lately it has been fed with foreign war and territorial conquest and it has found the taste good. The American people face the future possessed of all the material for a policy of aggressive Imperialism and with a splendidly youthful faith in their own good motives, a faith which can justify an action better than any degree of cynicism. There is as much of the "old Adam" in them as in the peoples of any of the "effete monarchies," and many circ.u.mstances seem to point to them as anxious to take the lead among the White Races in the future.

As regards the Pacific, American ambition is clear. The United States holds the Philippines at great expense of treasure and blood. She is fortifying Honolulu, with the idea of making it a naval base "stronger than Gibraltar."[1] She is cutting the Panama Ca.n.a.l and fortifying the entrances with the probable purpose of giving to the United States a monopoly of that gateway in time of war. With splendid audacity the American despises secrecy in regard to his future plans. In New York Naval Yard three years ago I was informed, with an amplitude of detail that was convincing, of the United States' scheme for patrolling the whole Pacific with her wars.h.i.+ps when the Ca.n.a.l had been finished.

Supposing, then, the United States to continue her present industrial and commercial progress; supposing her to gradually tighten her hold on the rest of the American continent; supposing her to overcome certain centrifugal forces now at work, the problem of the Pacific, should the United States decide to play a "lone hand," will be solved. It will become an American lake, probably after a terrible struggle in which the pretensions of the Yellow Races will be shattered, possibly after another fratricidal struggle in which the British possessions in the Pacific, Australia, and New Zealand, equally with Canada, will be forced to obedience.

But is there any necessity to consider the United States and the British Empire as playing mutually hostile parts in the Pacific? They have been the best of friends there in the past. They have many good reasons to remain friends in the future. A discussion as to whether the Pacific Ocean is destined to be controlled by the American or by the British Power could be reasonably ended with the query: Why not by an Anglo-Celtic union representing both?

An Anglo-Celtic alliance embracing Great Britain, the United States and the British Dominions, would settle in the best way the problem of the Pacific. No possible combination, Asiatic, European, or Asia-European, could threaten its position. But there are certain difficulties in the way, which will be discussed later. For the present, it has only to be insisted that both Powers are potential rather than actual masters of the Pacific. Neither in the case of Great Britain nor of the United States is a great Pacific force at the moment established. After her treaty with j.a.pan, Great Britain abandoned for a while the idea of maintaining any serious naval strength in the Pacific. The wars.h.i.+ps she maintained there, on the Australian station and elsewhere, had no fighting value against modern armaments, and were kept in the Pacific as a step towards the sc.r.a.p-heap. That policy has since been reversed, and the joint efforts of Great Britain, Australia, and New Zealand directed towards re-establis.h.i.+ng British Pacific naval strength. At the moment, however, the actual British naval force in the Pacific is inconsiderable, if obsolete or obsolescent vessels are ruled out of consideration. The United States also has no present naval force in the Pacific that could contest the issue with even a fraction of the j.a.panese navy. Clearly, too, she has no intention of attempting the organisation of a powerful Pacific Fleet separate from her Atlantic Fleet, but aims at the bolder policy of holding her interests in both oceans by one great Fleet which will use the Panama Ca.n.a.l to mobilise at an emergency in either.

If the resources of the present with their probable growth in the future are taken into account, Great Britain and the United States will appear as ma.s.sing enormous naval and military forces in the Pacific. The preponderance of naval force will be probably on the side of the United States for very many years--since it is improbable that Great Britain will ever be able to detach any great proportion of her Fleet from European waters and her Pacific naval force will be comprised mainly of levies from Australia and New Zealand, and possibly Canada, India, and South Africa. The preponderance of military force will be probably on the side of Great Britain, taking into count the citizen armies of Australia and New Zealand (and possibly of Canada) and the great forces available in India. Complete harmony between Great Britain and the United States in the Pacific would thus give the hegemony of the ocean to the Anglo-Saxon race. Rivalry between them might lead to another result. In the natural course of events that "other result" might be Asiatic dominion in one form or another.

These factors in Pacific rivalry will be discussed in detail in the following chapters.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Since the above was written it is reported that the United States has taken possession of Palmyra Island--once a British possession--to the south of Honolulu, obviously for strategic purposes.

CHAPTER II

RUSSIA IN THE PACIFIC

Russia, for generations the victim of Asia, when at last she had won to national greatness, was impelled by pressure from the West rather than by a sense of requital to turn back the tide of invasion. That pressure from the West was due to a misunderstanding in which Great Britain led the way, and which the late Lord Salisbury happily described when he stated that England "had backed the wrong horse" in opposing Russia and in aiding Turkey against her.

Russia, because she broke Napoleon's career of victory by her power of resistance, a power which was founded on a formlessness of national life rather than a great military strength, was credited by Europe with a fabulous might. Properly understood, the successful Russian resistance to the greatest of modern captains was akin to that of an earthwork which absorbs the sharpest blows of artillery and remains unmoved, almost unharmed. But it was misinterpreted, and a mental conception formed of the Russian earthwork as a mobile, aggressive force eager to move forward and to overwhelm Europe. Russia's feat of beating back the tide of Napoleonic invasion was merely the triumph of a low biological type of national organism. Yet it inspired Europe with a mighty fear.

The "Colossus of the North" came into being to haunt every Chancellery.

Nowhere was the fear felt more acutely than in Great Britain. It is a necessary consequence of the British Imperial expansion of the past, an expansion that came about very often in spite of the Mother Country's reluctance and even hostility, that Great Britain must now always view with distrust, with suspicion, that country which is the greatest of the European Continental Powers for the time being, whether it be France, Russia, or Germany. If British foreign policy is examined carefully it will be found to have been based on that guiding principle for many generations. Whatever nation appears to aim at a supreme position in Europe must be confronted by Great Britain.

Sometimes British statesmen, following instinctively a course which was set for them by force of circ.u.mstances, have not recognised the real reason of their actions. They have imagined that there was some ethical warrant for the desire for a European "balance of power." They have seen in the malignant disposition of whatever nation was the greatest Power in Europe for the time being a just prompting to arrange restraining coalitions, to wage crippling wars. But the truth is that the British race, with so much that is desirable of the earth under its flag, with indeed almost all the good empty lands in its keeping, must be jealous of the next European Power. On the other hand, every growing Power in Europe must look with envy on the rich claim which one prospector, and that one not the earliest, has pegged out in the open fields of the world. Thus between Great Britain and the next European Power in rank there is always a mutual jealousy. The growing Power is credited with a desire to seize the rich lands of the British Empire; and generally has the desire. The holding Power is apprehensive of every step forward of any rival, seeing in it a threat to her Empire's security. There is such a thing in this world as being too rich to be comfortable. That is Great Britain's national position.

Thus when the power of France was broken and Napoleon was safely shut up in St Helena, the British nation, relieved of one dread, promptly found another. Russia was credited with designs on India. She was supposed to be moving south towards the Mediterranean, and her object in seeking to be established there was obviously to challenge British naval supremacy, and to capture British overseas colonies. British diplomacy devoted itself sternly to the task of checkmating Russia. Russia, the big blundering amorphous nation, to whom England had given, some generations before, early promptings to national organisation, and who now sprawled clumsily across Europe groping for a way out of her ice-chains towards a warm-water port, became the traditional enemy of the British Empire.

This idea of Russian rivalry grew to be an obsession. The melodramas of the British people had for their favourite topic the odious cruelty of Russian tyranny. If a submarine cable to a British colony were interrupted, or a quarry explosion startled the air, the colonists at once turned their thoughts to a Russian invasion, and mobilised their volunteers. Colonists of this generation can remember the thrills of early childhood, when more than once they "prepared for the Russians,"

and the whole force of some hundreds of volunteers and cadets determined to sell their lives dearly on the battlefield to keep Russian knouts from the backs of their womenfolk, it being seriously considered that the Russian always celebrated a victory by a general knouting.