THE WORLD TO-DAY 437

policy was reaffirmed. But Japan, smarting under this frus-
tration and awaiting a better opportunity, invaded Man-
churia in 1931 in open defiance of the Washington declara-
tion and the Nine-Power Pact. She wriggled out of the
League of Nations on account of its protest against this
violation, and set up Pti Yi (the Manchu Emperor de-
throned by the Chinese in 1912) as her puppet * Emperor'
on the throne of Manchuria, renamed Manchukuo. She
had already taken Korea and called it Chosen. The pre-
sent Sino-Japanese War (1937—) is a sequel of the above
described trends in the Far East. The Japanese imperialism
of to-day was anticipated in an Imperial announcement
written in the autumn of 1916 :—

" China is our steed !" it ran. " Far shall we ride upon
her !... So becomes our 50,000,000 race 500,000,000 strong ;
so grow our paltry hundreds of millions of gold into bil-
lions !...

" We are now well astride our steed, China ; but the steed
has long run wild and is run down ; it needs grooming, more
grain, more training. Further, our saddle and bridle are
as yet mere make-shifts; would steed and trappings stand
the strain of war?: —

" But using China as our steed, should our first goal be
the land ? India ? Or the Pacific, the sea that must be our
very own, even as the Atlantic is now England's. The land
is tempting and easy, but withal dangerous... It must there-
fore be the sea." *

The awakening in India described in the previous chap-
ter received a fresh impetus in the course of the present
century on account of several events of world importance.
The first of these was the Japanese victory which synchro-

1. H, G. Franks, The Riddle of the Orient, pp. 31-2.