E-text prepared by Richard Tonsing
and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team
()
from page images generously made available by
Internet Archive
(https://archive.org)
| Note: | Images of the original pages are available through Internet Archive. See https://archive.org/details/awakeningofeast00lero |
The
Awakening of the East
SIBERIA—JAPAN—CHINA
PREFACE[1]
M. Leroy-Beaulieu’s work appears in English at a singularlyappropriate moment, and I believe that those who knowmost about the Far East will be the warmest in its praise.Its personal observations are acute, its statistics have beenconscientiously gathered and carefully collated, they arescrupulously restricted to the particular matters they areintended to illuminate, while most valuable of all is theauthor’s political sagacity, and the detachment, so to speak,of his attitude as an observer and investigator. If one maysay so without offence, this is rare in a writer of M. Leroy-Beaulieu’snationality. A Frenchman is usually so good aFrenchman that he cannot divest himself, even for an hour, ofthe preferences and prejudices of his own land and race.When, however, you do find a Frenchman who by temperament,research, and travel has attained to a cosmopolitanimpartiality, then nobody dwells in so cool and clear anatmosphere as he. The present volume, I venture to say, isvian example of this, for if there were no name on the title-page,and the word ‘we’ were not used of the French people, itwould be impossible to discover the writer’s nationality fromhis work. Hypercriticism might perhaps remark that M. Leroy-Beaulieuis just a little too ready to welcome as fact maliciouslittle anecdotes directed against ourselves, such as the ingeniousfiction that the British admiral saluted the Japanese admiral’sflag outside Wei-hai-wei before sunrise in order that the gunsshould awaken the sleeping Chinese seamen to a sense of theirperil, not to mention his ready acceptance as typical of the‘insatiable British public’ of the amusing boast of some unnamedEnglish newspaper that we might, if it pleased us, builda railway from the mouth of the Nile to the mouth of theYang-tsze. But, on the