Our Foreign Relations

THE curtain fell on the last scene of the nineteenth century drama to the ominous music of the bugle and cannon. The echoes only faintly reached our ears, for the Transvaal is remote; and, though the Philippine Islands are linked to us by vocal wires, the rude noise of insurgent-suppression has not the familiar thrilling note of war. The Republic is at peace with the great powers, itself having in the last half-hundred years become one of the greatest.

Yet it begins the new century in a state of unrest. Its responsibilities and risks have multiplied and expanded proportionately to its new power. The nations of Europe have made room for a newcomer in their select circle. The American has invaded the fancied private grounds sacred to the tread of old-world potentates. He has invaded it quietly as a bearer of light, then as a distributor of civilizing merchandise, and now boldly as a conqueror. The Republic has henceforth to be reckoned with as an unknown possibility, with the probabilities indicating a sure growth of world-greatness. The startling fact has caused a general scrutiny of the situation and the drift of things. If the powers are at peace, they are inwardly ill at ease. When Europe, Asia, and Africa feel chills and fever America cannot but feel premonitory symptoms of influenza. These are the little drawbacks to the joy of belonging to a great family. With every fresh move on the international chess-board each player and interested on-looker has to forecast, as best he can, its distant possible effect on his interests. The fine art and science of high diplomacy now becomes a thing of vital moment to the nation. From an easy contentment with paragraphic items about foreign statecraft, the patriotic American newspaper reader must henceforth scan the doings and the sayings of Europe's trained statesmen and Asia's oleaginous, dual-minded handlers of policy. He must learn to distinguish between words that mean less than the spaces that separate them, and omissions that signify the essential pith of the utterance. He will come to perceive how most of what appear to be deliberate decisions prove by and by to be mere feelers, deftly and successfully contrived to elicit the views or schemings of the other party. He will learn that what on their face seem to be startling acts are often simple traps for the unwary. The play is fascinating as it grows familiar. Whether it consumes time that might be used to better advantage in the home, is another question; but certain it is that expansion of responsibilities necessitates expansion of knowledge, insight, and wisdom, qualities already possessed in high degree by the American people, as their splendid history demonstrates; yet there is more need than ever that these virtues shall be broadened and deepened. The opening of the twentieth century is not the time for resting oars or reversing telescope.

Our relations with certain powers and peoples at the close of the century call for notice in this historical survey. And it is proper to follow the order in which our foreign affairs are stated in the President's message to the LXVth Congress. China stands first.

"The dominant question," says the message, "has been the treatment of the Chinese problem. Apart from this our relations with the powers have been happy. The recent troubles in China spring from the anti-foreign agitation which for the last three years has gained strength in the northern provinces. Their origin lies deep in the character of the Chinese race and in the traditions of their government. The Taiping rebellion and the opening of Chinese ports to foreign trade and settlement disturbed alike the homogeneity and the seclusion of China. Meanwhile foreign activity made itself felt in all quarters, not alone on the coast but along the great river arteries and in the remoter districts, carrying new ideas and introducing new associations among a primitive people which had pursued for centuries a national policy of isolation. The telegraph and the railway spreading over their land, the steamers plying on their waterways, the merchant and the missionary penetrating year by year farther to the interior, became to the Chinese mind types of an alien invasion, changing the course of their national life and fraught with vague forebodings of disaster to their beliefs and their self-control.

For several years before the present troubles all the resources of foreign diplomats, backed by moral demonstrations of the physical force of fleets and arms, have been needed to secure due respect for the treaty rights of foreigners and to obtain satisfaction from the responsible authorities for the sporadic outrages upon the persons and property of unoffending sojourners, which from time to time occurred at widely separated points in the northern provinces, as in the case of the outbreaks in Szechuen and Shantung. In the latter province an outbreak, in which German missionaries were slain, was the too natural result of these malevolent teachings. The posting of seditious placards, exhorting to the utter destruction of foreigners and of every foreign thing, continued unrebuked. Hostile demonstrations towards the stranger gained strength by organization.

The sect commonly styled the Boxers developed greatly in the provinces north of the Yangtse, and with the collusion of many notable officials, including some of the immediate councils of the throne itself, became alarmingly aggressive. No foreigner's life outside of the protected treaty ports was safe. No foreign interest was secure from spoliation.]