ΤΟ JOHN ROBERT SEELEY M.A. HON. LL.D. Regius Professor of Modern History Fellow of Gonville and Caius College Cambridge THIS BOOK IS RESPECTFULLY DEDICATED IN GRATEFUL ACKNOWLEDGMENT OF HIS KINDNESS AND IN ADMIRATION OF HIS QUALITIES AS A HISTORIAN BY THE AUTHOR PREFACE. I FEEL that some explanation is due when a Japanese ventures to address himself to English readers; my plea is that the matters on which I write are of vital importance to England as well as to Japan. Though I feel that my knowledge of English is so imperfect that many errors of idiom and style and even of grammar must appear in my pages, yet I hope that the courtesy which I have ever experienced in this country will be extended also to my book. My aim has been twofold: on the one hand, to arouse my own countrymen to a sense of the great part Japan has to play in the coming century; on the other, to call the attention of Englishmen to the important position my country occupies with regard to British interests in the far East. The first part deals with Japan and the Pacific Question: but so closely is the latter bound up with the so-called Eastern Question that in the second part I have traced the history of the latter from its genesis to its present development. Commencing with a historical retrospect of Russian and English policy in Eastern Europe, I have marked the appearance of a rivalry between these two Powers which has extended from Eastern Europe to Central Asia, and is extending thence to Eastern Asia and the Pacific. This I have done because any movement in Eastern Europe or Central Asia will henceforth infallibly spread northwards to the Baltic and eastwards to the Pacific. An acquaintance with the Eastern Question in all its phases will thus be necessary for the statesmen of Japan in the immediate future. I have confined my view view to England and Russia because their interests in Asia and the North Pacific are so direct and so important that |