Mukden brought that disdain out of its slumber. The battle was therefore an event of history more important than any since the fall of Constantinople. For very many years the European hegemony had been unquestioned. True, as late as 1795, Napoleon is credited with having believed that the power of the Grand Turk might be revived and an Ottoman suzerainty of Europe secured. But it was only a dream; more than half a century before that the doom of the Turk, who had been the most serious foe to Christian Europe, was sealed. From 1711 to 1905, whatever questions of supremacy arose among the different European Powers, there was never any doubt as to the superiority of the European race over all coloured races. The White Man moved from one easy conquest to another. In Asia, India, China, Persia and Japan were in turn humbled. Africa was made the slave-farm of the White Race. Now in the twentieth century at Mukden the White Race supremacy was again challenged. It was a long-dormant though not a new issue which was thus raised. From the times beyond which the memory of man does not stretch, Asia had repeatedly threatened Europe. The struggle of the Persian Empire to smother the Greek republics is the first of the invasions which has been accurately recorded by historians; but probably it had been preceded by many others. The waves of war that followed were many. The last was the Ottoman invasion in the fourteenth century, which brought the banners of Asia right up to the walls of Vienna, swept the Levant of Christian ships, and threatened even the Adriatic; and which has left the Turk still in the possession of Constantinople. But by the beginning of the eighteenth century the fear of the Turks gaining the mastery of Europe had practically disappeared, and after then the Europeans treated the coloured races as subject to them, and their territories as liable to partition whenever the method of division among rival White nations could be agreed upon. Mukden made a new situation. The European Powers were prompt to recognise the fact. Doubt even came to Great Britain whether the part she had played as foster-mother to this Asiatic infant of wonderful growth had been a wise one. A peace was practically forced upon Japan, a peace which secured for her at the moment nothing in the way of indemnity, but little in the way of territorial rights, and not even the positive elimination of her enemy from the Asiatic coast. True, she has since won Corea on the basis of that peace and has made secure certain suzerain rights in Manchuria, but this harvest had to be garnered by resolute diplomacy and by maintaining a naval and military expenditure after the war which called for an extreme degree of self-abnegation from her people.