ased. The scientists and officials had
from time to time considered the advisability of increasing the
restrictions--and yet why should they? The Japanese people had
submitted to the prohibition of the marriage of the unfit, but they
loved children; and, with their virile outdoor life, the instinct of
procreation was strong within them. True, the assignable lands in
Japan continued to grow smaller, but what reason was there for
stifling the reproductive instincts of a vigorous people in a great
unused world half populated by a degenerate humanity?

So Japan was land hungry--not for lands to conquer, as of old, nor
yet for lands to exploit commercially, but for food and soil and
breathing space for her children.

Among opponents of Japanese racial expansion, the United States was
the greatest offender. Japanese immigration had long since been
forbidden by the United States, and American diplomats had more
recently been instrumental in bringing about an agreement among the
powers of Europe by which all outlets were locked against the
overflowing stream of Asiatic population.

Indeed, America called Japan the yellow peril; and with her own
prejudices to maintain, her institutions of graft and exploitation
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, w