404 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 
Nations, General Lea says, are never stationary—they must neces- 
sarily expand or shrink, according to their vitality or decrepitude. 
Japan now is culminating; and by the fatal law in question it is im- 
possible that her statesmen should not long since have entered, with 
extraordinary foresight, upon a vast policy of conquest—the game in 
which the first moves were her wars with China and Russia and her 
treaty with England, and of which the final objective is the capture of 
the Philippines, the Hawaiian Islands, Alaska and the whole of our 
coast west of the Sierra passes. This will give Japan what her ineluc- 
table vocation as a state absolutely forces her to claim, the possession of 
the entire Pacific Ocean; and to oppose these deep designs we Ameri- 
cans have, according to our author, nothing but our conceit, our igno- 
rance, our commercialism, our corruption, and our feminism. General 
Lea makes a minute technical comparison of the military strength 
which we at present could oppose to the strength of Japan, and 
concludes that the islands, Alaska, Oregon and southern California, 
would fall almost without resistance, that San Francisco must 
surrender in a fortnight to a Japanese investment, that in three 
or four months the war would be over, and our republic, unable to re- 
gain what it had heedlessly neglected to protect sufficiently, would 
then “ disintegrate,” until perhaps some Caesar should arise to weld us 
again into a nation. 
A dismal forecast indeed! Yet not unplausible, if the mentality of 
Japan’s statesmen be of the Cesarian type of which history shows so 
many examples, and which is all that General Lea seems able to imag- 
ine. But there is no reason to think that women can no longer be the 
mothers of Napoleonic or Alexandrian characters; and if these come in 
Japan and find their opportunity, just such surprises as “ The Valor 
of Ignorance” paints may lurk in ambush for us. Ignorant as we still 
are of the innermost recesses of Japanese mentality, we may be fool- 
hardy to disregard such possibilities. 
Other militarists are more complex and more moral in their con- 
siderations. The “ Philosophie des Krieges,” by S. R. Steinmetz is a 
good example. War, according to this author, is an ordeal instituted 
by God, who weighs the nations in its balance. It is the essential form 
of the state, and the only function in which peoples can employ all 
their powers at once and convergently. No victory is possible save as 
the resultant of a totality of virtues, no defeat for which some vice or 
weakness is not responsible. Fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, 
conscience, education, inventiveness, economy, wealth, physical health 
and vigor—there isn’t a moral or intellectual point of superiority that 
doesn’t tell, when God holds his assizes and hurls the peoples upon one 
another. Die Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht ; and Dr. Steinmetz 
