Even with the Manchu handicap, the rate of progress during those years was such as to amaze the wisest foreign observers. "Could the sage, Confucius, have returned a decade ago," wrote that "old China hand," W. R. Manning, in 1910, "he would have felt almost as much at home as when he departed twenty-five centuries before. Should he return a decade hence he will feel almost as much out of place as Rip Van Winkle, if the recent rate of progress continues."[12] Toward the close of 1909 a close student of things Chinese, Harlan P. Beach, remarked: "Those who, like myself, can compare the China of twenty-five years ago with the China of this year, can hardly believe our senses."[13] It was on top of all this that there came the revolution, a happening hailed by so sophisticated an observer as Doctor Dillon as "the most momentous event in a thousand years."[14] Whatever may have been the political blunders of the revolutionists (and they were many), the revolution's moral results were stupendous. The stream of Western innovation flowed at a vastly accelerated pace into every Chinese province. The popular masses were for the first time awakened to genuine interest in political, as distinguished from economic or personal, questions. Lastly, the semi-religious feeling of family kinship, which in the past had been almost the sole recognized bond of Chinese race-solidarity, was powerfully supplemented by those distinctively modern concepts, national self-consciousness and articulate patriotism. Here was the Far Eastern situation at the outbreak of the Great War--a thoroughly modernized, powerful Japan, and a thoroughly aroused, but still disorganized, China. The Great War automatically made Japan supreme in the Far East by temporarily reducing all the European Powers to ciphers in Oriental affairs. How Japan proceeded to buttress this supremacy by getting a strangle-hold on China, every one knows. Japan's methods were brutal and cynical, though not a whit more so than the methods employed by white nations seeking to attain vital ends. And "vital" is precisely how Japan regards her hold over China. An essentially poor country with a teeming population, Japan feels that the exploitation of China's incalculable natural resources, a privileged position in the Chinese market, and guidance of Chinese national evolution in ways not inimical to Japan, can alone assure her future.