The geographic circumstance that placed China across the Pacific Ocean from the United States, the history and culture that gave it some 400,000,000 industrious, clever, prolific people of an ancient civilization, and the disorders that vexed the Chinese land as its people sought to adapt themselves to the industrial ways and materialist culture of the West long combined to make China an object of peculiar interest and concern to the people and Government of the United States. Itself the outstanding example of revolt against European colonialism, the United States of America was sympathetic to the efforts of the Chinese to work out their destiny in their own way and supported them as the situation permitted.