comprehensive understanding in which the Conference had ended. A Japanese observer of the change might silently console himself with the reflection that the Envy of the Gods, which his country had called down upon herself during the decade following August 1914, and which she had expiated in the earthquake of 1923, had now been diverted towards the United States, and that if, sooner or later, the issue between these two Great Powers were to be decided by force of arms, the stars in their courses might be expected, this time, to fight against America and not against Japan. No such consolation, however, was open to an English observer in foreboding a conflict. between the leading Oriental Power and the leading English-speaking Power in the Pacific-a conflict which Great Britain would be almost powerless to avert while she would be certain to suffer profoundly from its consequences. As a citizen of the Old World, where a consciousness of the tragic history of Mankind was impressed at every turn upon the imagination, he would be filled with misgivings as he observed the temper of a younger kindred nation overseas, and would be inclined to exclaim, with Solon:

τίκτει γὰρ κόρος ὕβριν ̓ ὅταν πολὺς ὄλβος ἕπηται

ἀνθρώποισιν ὅσοις μὴ νόος ἄρτιος ᾖ.

The hopeful feature in the situation was that this disquietude was shared by a considerable body of American opinion, which disapproved not so much of what Congress had done as of their manner of doing it.

STATISTICS OF JAPANESE NATIONALS RESIDENT ABROAD ON THE 31ST DECEMBER, 1913, AND THE 1ST OCTOBER, 1920.

1 Extracted from the Résumé statistique de l'Empire du Japon for 1915 and

1923 respectively.

2

Including Japanese residents in Macao (Portuguese).

3

Including Burma.

Japanese nationals resident in leased territories, man

dated territories, and railway zones not under

Japanese sovereignty:

Leased territory of Kwangtung

Leased territory of Kiaochao

153,905

23,555

4,502

3,671

185,633

PART I

WORLD AFFAIRS

C. THE THIRD (COMMUNIST) INTERNATIONAL AND THE UNION OF SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS (1923–4)

(i) Introductory Note.

In the course of the year 1924 de jure recognition was accorded to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics by Great Britain, Italy, and France in succession; and thus, after a lapse of more than six years, the three Principal European Allied Powers once more found themselves in official relations with a Government exercising sovereignty over the greater part of those territories which, before the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, had belonged to the Russian Empire. At this point, therefore, it may be convenient to examine briefly the likenesses and differences between the two states which respectively occupied the soil of Russia at the two dates in question. The Russian Empire which ceased to exist in 1917 had stood, during the preceding two and a half centuries, in a peculiar dual relation to Western society, to which the nearest historical parallel was perhaps the relation between the Seleucid Monarchy in the third and second centuries B. C. and the Greek world of that age. While the Seleucids were regarded (sometimes with reverence and sometimes with aversion) as apostles of Hellenism by the Jews, Iranians, and other Oriental peoples included in their vast dominions, the Greek citizen of Athens or Rhodes looked down upon these Greek heirs of Darius and Xerxes as little better than barbarians themselves. So it was with the Romanovs. To the peoples of Islam and the Far East, over whom they cast their shadow, they represented Western civilization-orderly, alien, and irresistible-whereas a German farmer in East Prussia or a British officer on the north-west frontier of India, as he turned his eyes in the direction of Russia, felt himself to be standing on the extreme verge of the civilized world and thought of the vast empire beyond, not as an outpost of the West, but as the threshold of an Oriental realm of darkness and ancient night which was perpetually threatening to bar the advance

M

of Western civilization, and even to contaminate the West itself, with its invincible ignorance, inefficiency, cruelty, and corruption.

This dual aspect, under which the Seleucid and Romanov Empires each appeared according to the points of view from which they were regarded, was due to a real similarity between their situations. In either case, a gigantic political structure (the Persian Empire and the Czardom of Muscovy) which had arisen in response to the native needs of the populations which it held together, had subsequently been converted, suddenly and artificially (in the one case owing to the military conquest of the East by Alexander the Great and in the other owing to the spiritual conversion of Peter the Great to Western civilization), into an instrument for inoculating these populations with an exotic culture. The effect of this treatment upon those subjected to it was so potent that it occupied the whole field of their consciousness and caused them to regard the Empire through which the process was being carried on as an essentially alien organization. At the same time this human mass upon which the experiment was being made was so vast in proportion to the quantity of leaven at work, and the leavening process appeared so gradual when viewed from outside, that Western observers were hardly able to discern a ferment which, for the Orientals among whom it was at work, was a shattering experience. The result was that Western society repudiated, as something alien to itself, a political organization which was actually serving as a not ineffective channel for the propagation of Western culture, and Western opinion only became aware too late, when the hybrid empire had been overthrown as suddenly as it had been created, how great in fact was the hitherto unacknowledged service which it had been rendering, in spite of all its shortcomings. In the case of the Romanov Empire these posthumous regrets were sharpened by the unexampled rapidity with which events moved after the catastrophe had occurred. The Romanov Empire was broken by the impact of Germany in the War of 1914, as the Seleucid Empire was by that of Rome in the campaign which ended in 189 B. C. with the Battle of Magnesia; and in either case the immediate result was chaos. The border provinces through which the hybrid empire was attached to the Western world of the time gravitated, in accordance with their natural affinity, towards their Western neighbours, while in the Oriental hinterland every village community reverted to a self-contained economy and every half-assimilated nomadic or highland tribe hastened to shake off a yoke to which it had never morally submitted. At this point,

however, the two courses of events ceased to run parallel. After the fall of the Seleucid Empire many centuries elapsed before the void left by it in the Oriental hinterland, beyond that fringe of border provinces which had been incorporated in the Roman Empire, was occupied again by political and cultural forces of an active nature. After the fall of the Romanov Empire, on the other hand, the work of centuries seemed to be accomplished in a few years; for while the western border provinces duly gravitated towards the West-for the eight months following the Treaty of BrestLitovsk under the military domination of Germany, and thereafter, under the loose hegemony of the victorious Allied Powers, as sovereign States Members of the League of Nations 1-the vast hinterland of the defunct empire was reassembled and reorganized, before the close of the year 1920, under the sovereignty of a new Power which arose, Phoenix-like, out of the ashes of the Czardom. It was as if, in the Ancient East, the fall of the Seleucid Empire had been followed at an interval, not of eight centuries but of four years, by the rise of the Islamic Caliphate.

1

The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which succeeded the Romanov Empire on Russian soil at this astonishingly brief interval,2 presented two broad contrasts to its predecessor. In the first place, it was committed to the service of Communism in the form of a missionary religion' permanently at war with Western civilization. In the second place it was organized on an elaborate federal basis of devolution within devolution, which was calculated to give some measure of autonomy (in constitutional law, if not in political practice) even to the smallest and most backward of the many nationalities contained within its frontiers. In both these respects it was the antithesis of the Romanov Empire, which had been designed to Westernize its non-Western subjects and at the same time to Russify its non-Russian nationalities.

The nature and methods of the world-wide propaganda which was conducted by the Third or Communist International from its headquarters in Moscow will be discussed in the next section; but,

1 Poland received full de jure recognition on the 28th June, 1919; Esthonia on the 26th January, 1921; and Latvia on the 22nd September, 1921. Lithuania became a Member of the League of Nations on the 21st September, 1921, but was not recognized de jure by the Principal Allied Powers till the 20th December, 1922.

2 Strictly, the Russian Empire was succeeded by the Russian Socialist Federal Soviet Republic and this was succeeded in turn by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, in which, of course, the R.S.F.S.R. remained the predominant member.