PRESENT JAPAN
employed a navy of twenty-eight ships which remained on active service for nine months.
It was the cheapest belligerent feat on record, and it established for the Japanese the possession of a faculty which had been habitually denied to them by foreign critics, the faculty of organisation. For the purposes of that war their organisation was really admirable. Such an effort might have been expected to tax their strength to the utmost, to interrupt the course of every-day business, and to throw their domestic affairs into more or less confusion. It did nothing of the kind. The home life of the people went on placidly and regularly, as though not a ship or a soldier had been sent to meet a foreign enemy. Sometimes a little village community left their farm labours to cheer a detachment of troops en route for Manchuria or Korea, and sometimes the arrival of a batch of wounded Chinese created a passing thrill of excitement. But, for the rest, the great fighting machine worked with absolute silence and smoothness. The troops, carried over specially constructed railways outside the boundaries of the chief cities, or marched quietly at night through their streets, seldom attracted public attention; the fleet of fifty steam transports was descried once or twice gliding through the narrow strait that gives upon the China Sea, but never came into the vista of national observation; the newspapers reported yesterday that an army corps of twenty thousand men had embarked
21
