begun to be especially amicable. In South China the rivalry between France and Great Britain was manifested afresh by the proposed opening of the West River and concessions in Yunnan obtained by the latter, and the sphere created on the Kwang-chow Bay by the former. Japan also secured the pledge of non-alienation of the province of Fuh-kien, which lies opposite her new territory of Formosa. [Illustration: FOREIGN SPHERES OF INFLUENCE IN CHINA AND MANCHURIA] It is necessary in order to comprehend the situation with any degree of clearness, sharply to distinguish the nature of the Russian concessions in Liao-tung from those of all the other "spheres" in North and South China. It was alone in the former instance that new naval posts of great moment were directly connected by a railroad with the military centers of an enormous and contiguous dominion which represented an expansion through centuries. The creation of naval posts on the strategic points of the peninsula would be sufficient, as was avowed by Russia herself three years before, to threaten Peking, render the independence of Korea illusory, and continually imperil the peace of the Far East, and its dangers must further be measured by the immense pressure which might be exercised with the military resources of all the Russias that lay behind Liao-tung and were now connected thereto by rail. The situation was made worse by an Anglo-Russian railway agreement of April 28, 1899. The origin of this document belongs to the history of China. It suffices here to point out that it provided that Great Britain should not seek any railway concession north of the Great Wall, and Russia should observe the same principle in the Yang-tse basin. The peculiarity of this agreement consists in the fact that one of its signatories was not, as usual, the Chinese government, but that two European powers thereby pledged themselves not to infringe upon each other's sphere of railroad concession in China. Diplomatic exigencies might (as they have since done beyond the wall) induce one of the parties to interpret the railroad sphere in the light of a political sphere.