to fatten her luxury-loving lords and her laborers to appease, she
was in mortal terror of the simple efficiency of the Japanese people
who had taken the laws of Nature into their own hands and shaped
human evolution by human reason.

As Commodore Perry had forced the open door of commerce upon Japan a
century before, so Japan decided to force upon America the
acknowledgment of any human being's right to live in any land on
earth. She had tried first by peaceful means to secure these ends,
but failing here and driven on by the lash of her own necessity,
Japan had come to feel that force alone could break the clannish
resistance of the Anglo-Saxon, who having gone into the four corners
of the earth and forced upon the world his language, commerce and
customs, now refused to receive ideas or citizens in return.

And thus it came to pass that the West and the East were in the
clutch of the War-God. No one knew just what the war would be like,
for the wars of the last century had been bluffing, bulldozing
affairs concerning trade agreements or Latin-American revolutions.
There had been no great clash of great ideas and great peoples.

The harbors of the world were filled with huge, floating,
flat-topped battleships, within the capacious interiors of which
were packed the parts of aeroplanes as were the soldiers of the
Grecian army in their wooden horse at Troy, for assembling and
launching them. But the engines of warfare which men had repeatedly
claimed would make war so terrible as to end war, had failed to
fulfill anticipations. The means of defense and the rules of the
game had kept pace with the means of destruction. The flat tops of
the warships, which served as alighting platforms for friendly