China Captive Or Free Author:Gilbert Reid Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER HI INTRUSION INTO CHINA OF THE EUROPEAN WAR: BRITAIN AND JAPAN IN THE LEAD The war that was raging in 1914 was not yet a World War, it was only a E... more »uropean war. In it, Germany and Austria-Hungary were arrayed on the one side, and Serbia, Russia, France, Great Britain and Belgium were on the other side. Hence this war had no business in Asia. Whatever the diplomacy which carried the lighted torch from the conflagration of western Europe far away into eastern Asia, it was a diplomacy deserving our severest condemnation. Who, then, was the guilty party? Shall China, in lamenting her present unfortunate situation, forget the primal source of all these woes in the political manceuverings of the year 1914, August to December, and the daring, drastic, unfeeling intrusion on China's political integrity by the two island empires, Britain and Japan ? If it is hard for an American of English and Scotch stock to speak favourably of German conduct, even as seen in distant China, it is just as hard, yea, uncongenial and almost irreverent, to acknowledge any wrong, or error of judgment, or diplomatic waywardness, in those of one's own kith or kin, our cousins across the sea, in their dealings, past or present, with the yellow and brown races of the Asiatic continent. But facts should overrule personal proclivities in matters so serious as the destiny of an ancient people. Personally I still hold in highest esteem the religious qualities, the mental alertness, the sense of fair-play and the courageous resolve to defend among men civil and religious liberty, which characterize the Anglo-Saxon race,but I cannot close my eyes to the diplomatic blunder and illegal transaction concerning the neutral rights of China, in the closing months of 1914, which characterized the policy of the B...« less