Note: Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/awakeningofeast00lero Transcriber’s note: Text enclosed by underscores is in italics (_italics_). THE AWAKENING OF THE EAST Siberia—Japan—China by PIERRE LEROY-BEAULIEU With a preface by Henry Norman Author of “People and Politics of the Far East,” “The Real Japan,” etc. New York McClure, Phillips & CO. M C M Copyright, 1900, By McClure, Phillips & Co. First Impression, November, 1900 Second Impression, January, 1901 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ PREFACE[1] M. Leroy-Beaulieu’s work appears in English at a singularly appropriate moment, and I believe that those who know most about the Far East will be the warmest in its praise. Its personal observations are acute, its statistics have been conscientiously gathered and carefully collated, they are scrupulously restricted to the particular matters they are intended to illuminate, while most valuable of all is the author’s political sagacity, and the detachment, so to speak, of his attitude as an observer and investigator. If one may say so without offence, this is rare in a writer of M. Leroy-Beaulieu’s nationality. A Frenchman is usually so good a Frenchman that he cannot divest himself, even for an hour, of the preferences and prejudices of his own land and race. When, however, you do find a Frenchman who by temperament, research, and travel has attained to a cosmopolitan impartiality, then nobody dwells in so cool and clear an atmosphere as he. The present volume, I venture to say, is an example of this, for if there were no name on the title-page, and the word ‘we’ were not used of the French people, it would be impossible to discover the writer’s nationality from his work. Hypercriticism might perhaps remark that M. Leroy-Beaulieu is just a little too ready to welcome as fact malicious little anecdotes directed against ourselves, such as the ingenious fiction that the British admiral saluted the Japanese admiral’s flag outside Wei-hai-wei before sunrise in order that the guns should awaken the sleeping Chinese seamen to a sense of their peril, not to mention his ready acceptance as typical of the ‘insatiable British public’ of the amusing boast of some unnamed English newspaper that we might, if it pleased us, build a railway from the mouth of the Nile to the mouth of the Yang-tsze. But, on the whole, he probably approaches as near to the ‘impartial spectator’ of an old-fashioned philosophical hypothesis as it is given to anybody in this prejudiced world to do; and assuredly the brilliant ability with which he has analyzed and summarized national and international situations of the greatest delicacy and complexity speaks for itself.