to sporadic disorder, simply because America had no Russian policy of her own, and rejected that of her friends. It was a major mistake of England and France to leave America and Japan cheek by jowl without a moderating influence, to wreck the good work they had accomplished in the Far East. The rivalries of these two Powers in this part of the world were well known and should have been provided for. It was too much to expect that they would forget their concession and trade rivalries in a disinterested effort to help Russia. States are not usually philanthropic organisations, these two least of all. The work has therefore to be largely done over again, either by us or by the Supreme Governor, Admiral Koltchak. Or the Allies, finding the task too great, may retire and allow this huge province, probably the wealthiest part of the world, to recede back to the barbarism of the Bolshevik. CHAPTER XXIII JAPANESE POLICY AND ITS RESULTS The lack of Allied cohesion produced by the defection of American policy from that of the European Powers may change completely the status and future of American enterprise in Siberia. America has transformed a friendly population into at least a suspicious, if not a hostile, one. Japan, on the other hand, has steadily pursued her special interests and taken full advantage of every American mistake, until she is now looked upon as the more important of the two. The attitude of Japan to the Russian problem made a complete somersault in the course of the year August, 1918, to August, 1919. When Japan sent her 12th Division, under General Oie, to the Ussurie in 1918, she did so with a definite policy. Her ambitions were entirely territorial in character; they doubtless remain so. The line of her advance has, however, completely changed. In 1918 she had made up her mind that Germany was bound to win the war; that Russia was a conquered country; that any day she might be called upon to repudiate her English alliance and her Entente engagements, and assist Germany and her Bolshevik Allies in driving the Entente Powers from the eastern end of the Tsar's dominions. Provided Germany defeated the Allies on the Western front, as she confidently anticipated, this task was well within her power. So insignificant was the task assigned to her in this eventuality that she confidently expected the immediate surrender of such scattered Allied and American forces as would find themselves marooned in this back end of the world. Believing this to be the position, she acted accordingly, treating the Russians and the other Allied forces in the stupidly arrogant manner I have already described. With the _naïveté_ of a young Eastern prodigy she not only made demands upon her Allies, but at the same time made definite proposals to such Russian authorities as retained a precarious control over the territory she had already assigned to herself. On landing her troops at Vladivostok she presented,