Yet the Far East is changing with the change in conditions everywhere in modern times, and it is evident that the premises for any conclusion as to German foreign policy there may, at any given moment, be subject to modification. Partly owing to the growth of Germany's European influence, and to the increase in her navy which has helped her to it, she is to be found of recent years playing a role in the Far East which would have been unintelligible to the German of the last generation. There are many Germans to-day, as in Bismarck's time, who ridicule the notion that the possibilities of trade in Oriental countries justify the national risk now run for it and the national expenditure now made upon it; but it is sometimes forgotten that, apart from the chance of obtaining concessions for the building of railways, for the establishment of banks, for the leasing of mines and working of cotton plantations, there is a large German export of beads, cloth, and, in short, of hundreds of articles which appeal to barbarian or only semi-civilized tastes. Germany, too, looks hopefully forward to a future in which she will be supplied with the raw material of her manufactures by her colonies, or failing that by her subjects trading abroad in the colonies of other nations. This is one of the main objects of her Weltpolitik. As Prince von Bülow said: "The time has passed when the German left the earth to one neighbour and the sea to another, while he reserved heaven, where pure doctrines are enthroned, to himself;" and again: "We don't seek to put anybody in the shade, but we demand our place in the sun;" and the idea finds technical expression in the phrase on which Germany lays so much stress, the "maintenance of the open door." Her policy in the Far East, as in Europe, is thus on the whole a commercial one; she seeks there as elsewhere new markets, not new territory. Accordingly she supports the principle of the _status quo_ in China, and therefore raised no objection to the Anglo-Japanese Agreement of 1902 which, among other objects, secured it.