Twenty-one years later a Chinese warship steamed into the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico, to back up a demand of the Chinese government for an indemnity for a massacre of Chinese subjects. She was a little warship, but she bore a momentous mandate, performed it and steamed away, the world as inattentive to the event as it had been to the prophecy. Perhaps our national indifference to the portentous phenomenon came of “use and wont;” already an American president had been made to grovel at the feet of a Japanese emperor, and had truculently threatened a state of the union with war if it did not adjust its municipal laws to the will of that Asian sovereign. Clearly, as the hope was then expressed, “we have reached the end of Asiatic dictation”—the hither end, unfortunately. All Asia is astir, looking East and West. Its incalculable multitudes are learning war and navigation; and Caucasian powers—“infatuate, blind, selfsure!”—are their tutors. Their armies are taught by European officers, their warships are built in European and American ports. All the military powers unite in maintaining “the integrity of China” and in awakening her to aggression and dominance. Even if it were to our immediate interest to preserve the integrity of the Chinese Empire a long look ahead might disclose a greater one that would be best subserved by partition. In a single generation Japan has performed the astonishing feat of changing civilizations. It has been, for her, retrogression, for the civilization that she has discarded was superior to that which she has adopted; but in one important particular she has been the gainer by the exchange; in the matter, namely, of military power, and therefore political consequence. As by a leap, she has advanced from nowhere to the position of a first-rate power. What she has done China is doing, with this difference: China’s advance will be to a position that will dominate the world and reduce the foremost nations of to-day to second place. Trained by European officers to European methods of warfare, such an army as she can raise and equip from her four hundred millions of population will be invincible. It may overrun Europe and extinguish Christian civilization on that continent, which would not be a very good thing for it on this. It was only yesterday—a little more than two hundred years ago—that Europe came within a single battle-hazard of being an Islam dependency. If John Sobieski had been defeated under the walls of Vienna, that city, Berlin, Paris and London would to-day be Mohammedan capitals. History has not exhausted its reserve of astounding events, nor have civilizations learned the secret of stability.