The Czar's Government, Accordingly, Determined
To Interpose, And, Having Secured The Co-Operation Of Its French Ally, And
Also Of
Germany, it presented to the Mikado, in the name of the three
powers, a request that he should waive that
Part of the Shimonoseki Treaty
which provided for the surrender of the Liau-Tung Peninsula. It was
proposed that, in return for the renunciation of this territory on the
Chinese mainland, the pecuniary indemnity should be increased by
$30,000,000, and that Wei-hai-Wei should be retained until the whole sum
should have been paid. The demand was, obviously, one that could not be
rejected without war against the three interposing powers, and the odds
were too great for Japan to face without the assistance of Great Britain,
which Lord Rosebery, then prime minister, did not see fit to offer. The
Mikado, accordingly, submitted to the loss of the best part of the fruits
of victory, retaining only Formosa and the Pescadores, the value of which
is, as yet, undetermined; with the money indemnity, however, Japan has
been enabled so greatly to strengthen her fleet that, when all the vessels
building for her are completed, she will take rank as a naval power of the
first class in the Pacific.
For some time after the revision of the Shimonoseki Treaty, the Chinese
seem to have imagined that the Czar had intervened from disinterested
motives, but Count Cassini, the Russian minister at Pekin, eventually made
it clear that the interposition would not be gratuitous.
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