overthrow of your enemy was regarded as the only admissible form of war,
the action of the Japanese in resorting to hostilities was regarded as
madness. Only in England, with her tradition and instinct for what an
island Power may achieve by the lower means, was Japan considered to have
any reasonable chance of success.

The case is particularly striking; for every one felt that the real object
of the war was in the abstract unlimited, that it was in fact to decide
whether Russia or Japan was to be the predominant power in the Far East.
Like the Franco-German War of 1870 it had all the aspect of what the
Germans call "a trial of strength." Such a war is one which above all
appears incapable of decision except by the complete overthrow of the one
Power or the other. There was no complication of alliances nor any
expectation of them. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty had isolated the struggle.
If ever issue hung on the sheer fighting force of the two belligerents it
would seem to have been this one. After the event we are inclined to
attribute the result to the moral qualities and superior training and
readiness of the victors. These qualities indeed played their part, and
they must not be minimised; but who will contend that if Japan had tried to
make her war with Russia, as Napoleon made his, she could have fared even
as well as he did? She had no such preponderance as Clausewitz laid down as
a condition precedent to attempting the overthrow of her enemy--the
employment of unlimited war.

Fortunately for her the circumstances did not call for the employment of
such extreme means. The political and geographical conditions were such
that she was able to reduce the intangible object of asserting her prestige
to the purely concrete form of a territorial objective. The penetration of
Russia into Manchuria threatened the absorption of Korea into the Russian
Empire, and this Japan regarded as fatal to her own position and future