Every land battle of the war, except those of the Saghalien campaign, was fought in China, Chinese ports were blockaded, Chinese waters were filled with enemy mines and torpedoes, and the prize was Chinese territory or territory recently taken from her.To deny these facts was impossible; to admit them seemed to involve the disintegration of the empire.Here again Secretary Hay, devising a middle course, gained by his promptness of action the prestige of having been the first to speak.On February 8, 1904, he asked Germany, Great Britain, and France to join with the United States in requesting Japan and Russia to recognize the neutrality of China, and to localize hostilities within fixed limits.On January 10, 1905, remembering how the victory of Japan in 1894 had brought compensatory grants to all the powers, he sent out a circular note expressing the hope on the part of the American Government that the war would not result in any "concession of Chinese territory to neutral powers." Accustomed now to these invitations which decency forbade them to refuse, all the powers assented to this suggestion.The results of the war, therefore, were confined to Manchuria, and Japan promised that her occupation of that province should be temporary and that commercial opportunity therein should be the same for all.The culmination of American prestige came with President Roosevelt's offer of the good offices of the United States, on June 8, 1905.
As a result, peace negotiations were concluded in the Treaty of Portsmouth (New Hampshire) in 1905.For this conspicuous service to the cause of peace President Roosevelt was awarded the Nobel prize.
Secretary Hay had therefore, in the seven years following the real arrival of the United States in the Far East, evolved a policy which was clear and definite, and one which appealed to the American people.While it constituted a variation from the precise methods laid down by President Monroe in 1823, in that it involved concerted and equal cooperation with the great powers of the world, Hay's policy rested upon the same fundamental bases: a belief in the fundamental right of nations to determine their own government, and the reduction to a minimum of intervention by foreign powers.To have refused to recognize intervention at all would have been, under the circumstances, to abandon China to her fate.In protecting its own right to trade with her, the United States protected the integrity of China.Hay had, moreover, so ably conducted the actual negotiations that the United States enjoyed for the moment the leadership in the concert of powers and exercised an authority more in accord with her potential than with her actual strength.Secretary Hay's death in 1905 brought American leadership to an end, for, though his policies continued to be avowed by all concerned, their application was thereafter restricted.The integrity of Chinese territory was threatened, though not actually violated, by the action of Great Britain in Tibet and of Japan in Manchuria.Japan, recognized as a major power since her war with Russia, seemed in the opinion of many to leave but a crack of the door open in Manchuria, and her relationship with the United States grew difficult as she resented more and more certain discriminations against her citizens which she professed to find in the laws of some of the American States, particularly in those of California.
