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
development. Her power to maintain Korean integrity would be the outward
and visible sign of her ability to assert herself as a Pacific Power. Her
abstract quarrel with Russia could therefore be crystallised into a
concrete objective in the same way as the quarrel of the Western Powers
with Russia in 1854 crystallised into the concrete objective of Sebastopol.

In the Japanese case the immediate political object was exceptionally well
adapted for the use of limited war. Owing to the geographical position of
Korea and to the vast and undeveloped territories which separate it from
the centre of Russian power, it could be practically isolated by naval
action. Further than this, it fulfilled the condition to which Clausewitz
attached the greatest importance--that is to say, the seizure of the
particular object