It is a problem not only of navies and armies (though with our present defective civilisation these are the most important factors): it is a problem also of populations and their growth, of industries, of the development of natural resources, of trade and commerce. The Pacific littoral is in part unpeopled, in part undeveloped, unorganised, unappropriated. Its Asiatic portion must change, it is changing, from a position which may be compared with that of Japan fifty years ago to a position such as Japan's to-day. Its American and Australian portion must develop power and wealth surpassing that of Europe. Under whose leadership will the change be made? To discuss that question is the purpose of this book: and at the outset the lines on which the discussion will proceed and the conclusions which seem to be inevitable may be foreshadowed.
At one time Russia seemed destined to the hegemony of the Pacific. Yet she was brought to the Pacific coast by accident rather than by design. Her natural destiny was westward and southward rather than eastward, though it was natural that she should slowly permeate the Siberian region. As far back as the reign of Ivan the Terrible (the Elizabethan epoch in Anglo-Saxon history), the curious celibate military organisation of the Cossacks had won much of Siberia for the Czars. But there was no dream then, nor at a very much later period, of penetration to the Pacific.
European jealousy of Russia, a jealousy which is explainable only with the reflection that vast size naturally fills with awe the human mind, stopped her advance towards the Mediterranean. In the north her ports were useless in winter. In the south she was refused a development of her territory which was to her mind natural and just. Thus thwarted, Russia groped in a blind way from the Siberian provinces which had been won by the Cossacks towards a warm-water port in Asia. At first the movement was southward and filled England with alarm as to the fate of India. Then it turned eastward, and in Manchuria and Corea this European Power seemed to find its destiny. But Japan was able to impose an effective check upon Russian ambitions in the Far East. At the present moment Russia has been supplanted in control of the Asiatic seaboard by Japan.