At the moment, the "opening" of the Far East was hailed by white men with general approval, but of late years many white observers have regretted this forcible dragging of reluctant races into the full stream of world affairs. As an Australian writer, J. Liddell Kelly, remarks: "We have erred grievously by prematurely forcing ourselves upon Asiatic races. The instinct of the Asiatic in desiring isolation and separation from other forms of civilization was much more correct than our craze for imposing our forms of religion, morals, and industrialism upon them. It is not race-hatred, nor even race-antagonism, that is at the root of this attitude; it is an unerring intuition, which in years gone by has taught the Asiatic that his evolution in the scale of civilization could best be accomplished by his being allowed to develop on his own lines. Pernicious European compulsion has led him to abandon that attitude. Let us not be ashamed to confess that he was right and we were wrong."[7] However, rightly or wrongly, the deed was done, and the yellow races, forced into the world-arena, proceeded to adapt themselves to their new political environment and to learn the correct methods of survival under the strenuous conditions which there prevailed. In place of their traditional equilibrated, self-sufficient order, the yellow peoples now felt the ubiquitous impacts of the dynamic Western spirit, insistent upon rapid material progress and forceful, expansive evolution. Japan was the first yellow people to go methodically to the white man's school, and Japan's rapid acquirement of the white man's technology soon showed itself in dramatic demonstrations like her military triumphs over China in 1894, and over Russia a decade later. Japan's easy victory over huge China astounded the whole world. That these "highly intelligent children," as one of the early British ministers to Japan had characterized them, should have so rapidly acquired the technique of Western methods was almost unbelievable. Indeed, the full significance of the lesson was not immediately grasped, and the power of New Japan was still underestimated. A good example of Europe's underestimation of Japanese strength was the proposal a Dutch writer made in 1896 to curb possible Japanese aggression on the Dutch Indies by taking from Japan the island of Formosa which Japan had acquired from China as one of the fruits of victory. "Holland," asserted this writer, "must take possession of Formosa."[8] The grotesqueness of this dictum as it appears to us in the light of subsequent history shows how the world has moved in twenty-five years.