But the battle of the Yalu and the taking of Port Arthur in one morning by the troops of the Mikado opened the eyes of the Cabinet of St. James’s. What Britain desired in the Far East was, on the one hand, a political prop, and even a military one, if necessary, against the Empire of the Tsar—‘a bolt to fasten the door against the ambitions of Russian expansion,’ to use the significant expression of Herr von Brandt, and, on the other, a wide opening for her commerce and capital. Once convinced that Japan, firmly established in Korea and on the northern coast of the Gulf of Pe-chi-li, would become a far more efficacious ‘bolt’ than China, England began to favour the Japanese, and at the same time to advise the Chinese Government to abandon Peking, and establish itself nearer the centre of the Empire. If the Middle Kingdom was no longer a useful ally, it might still become a splendid prey, a field of extraordinary economic activity, so that the transfer of the capital to some point on the banks of the Yang-tsze accessible by sea—to Nanking, for instance, would have placed China at the mercy of the supreme mistress of the seas. The English, moreover, fully intended to force China to open her ports, and their commercial superiority and the influence which they have already established over the peoples in the Far East would soon have enabled them to profit largely by this revolution. If, however, the consequences of the Chinese defeat were realized in London, they were no less so in St. Petersburg, and subsequent events proved that Russian diplomacy was equal to the occasion. The Government of the Tsar had beheld the war with quite as much displeasure as England, and would have preferred the Far Eastern Question remaining in abeyance until the termination of the Trans-Siberian Railway. The object pursued by Russia in the Far East is, it should be remembered, absolutely opposed to that of England, and concentrates itself on the one issue—the securing of open sea. The vast Empire of the Tsars possesses no port in Europe, where the ‘keys of the house’ are in the hands, so to speak, of other Powers, and England barred her way to the south fifteen or twenty years ago in Afghanistan and Beluchistan. In the Far East somewhere in the middle of the century Russia contrived to descend from the Polar Sea of Okhotsk and to advance at the expense of China as far as Vladivostok; but this port remains closed for two months on account of the ice, and Russia has always considered her provinces of the Amur and of the Littoral merely in the light of temporary stations, whence she intended on some future and favourable occasion to push her way further south. Between 1880 and 1886 it was reported that she was about to obtain a concession somewhere in the Bay of Korea, or even in the isle of Quelpart, which is in the strait separating that country from Japan. A little later she seemed to covet Port Arthur or