Japan seems to have learned absolutely nothing from her first contact with European civilisation. She settled down to the old policy of rigorous exclusiveness, and to a renewal of her tribal and religious warfare, in the midst of which, like a strange flower in a rocky cleft, flourished a dainty æstheticism. The nineteenth century thus dawned on Japan, a bitterly poor country, made poorer by the devotion of much of her energies to internal warfare and by the devotion of some of her scanty supply of good land to the cultivation of flowers instead of grain. The observer of the day could hardly have imagined more unpromising material for the making of the modern Japanese nation, organised with Spartan thoroughness for naval, military and industrial warfare. The United States in 1853 led the way in the successful attempt of White civilisation to open up trade relations with Japan. The method was rude; and it was followed by resolute offers of "friendship," backed by armed threats, from Great Britain, France, Russia and Portugal. The Japanese wanted none of them. The feeling of the people was distinctly anti-foreign. They wished to be left to their flowers and their family feuds. But the White Man insisted. In 1864 a combination of Powers forced the Straits of Shimonoseki. The Japanese were compelled by these and other outrages to a feeling of national unity. In the face of a foreign danger domestic feuds were forgotten. By 1869 Japan had organised her policy on a basis which has kept internal peace ever since (with the exception of the revolt of the Satsuma in 1884), and she had resolved on fighting out with Russia the issue of supremacy in the Pacific. Within a quarter of a century the new nation had established herself as a Power by the sensational defeat, on land and sea, of China. The Peace of Shimonoseki extended her territory to Formosa and the Pescadores, and filled her treasury with the great war indemnity of £57,000,000. She then won, too, a footing on the Asiatic mainland, but was for the time being cheated of that by the interference of Europe, an interference which was not repeated when, later, having defeated Russia in war and having won an alliance with Great Britain, she finally annexed Corea.