It is impossible to imagine in the history of the Russo-Japanese conflict a more striking indication of the new situation it has opened than this Protocol of February 23, 1904. It is at once a culmination of past events and a background for future activities. It sums up the failures of the past experience and calls forth innumerable new problems and difficulties. It will be seen, in the first place, that the agreement is limited by no fixed term; it exists for all time. Then the fundamental problem of the Japanese-Korean relations is revealed here in this Protocol in a clear outline, and is solved in the most logical manner. The problem may be stated thus: Japan’s interest and conviction demand that Korea should be independent, prosperous, and powerful; but Korea neither could nor would be so. One remembers how Japan had struggled to solve this problem, ever since she overthrew the feudal régime of her own Government in 1868 and entered upon a new career as a nation. At first, in 1876, she declared Korea independent, and opened a few of her ports to the world’s trade. Korea did not desire and China could not tolerate the independence. The result was the war of 1894–5, which succeeded in forcing the independence of Korea. The latter, however, proved neither more desirous nor more capable of an independent career than she was under Chinese sovereignty, while at the time China’s position was merely replaced by that of a more active Power, Russia. Japan seemed, after her costly war, which, it is not too much to say, alone had earned the sovereign rights of Korea, to acquiesce in the altered situation to such an extent as to admit Russia into a partnership with herself in the nonintervention in Korea.[685] Bitter was Japan’s experience in this artificial arrangement. Korea would not strive for a freer life any more than Russia would abstain from incessant interference.[686] Thus the conviction was every year more forcibly and painfully impressed upon Japan’s mind that the threatening situation in the East arose from the two fundamental defects of the existing arrangement: first, Korea’s independence would be illusory so long as her administrative system remained, as it did, corrupt to the core, but no reform would result from a system of non-interference; second, no joint reform in Korea would be possible so long as one of the contracting parties to the agreements of 1896 and 1898 found in Korea’s decay the source of its influence over her. In short, in order to guard the common interests of Japan and Korea, the former would be constrained to reform the latter even against her will; and, again, in order to effect a thoroughgoing reform, Japan would be obliged to part ways with Russia in Korea. One half of the Russo-Japanese negotiations in 1903–4 hinged on Japan’s desire for a free hand in Korea in the interest of reform. The negotiations having failed, and Russia having withdrawn from