In the Clutch of the War-God | Page 4

known in the prattle of her preachers and idealists. America was the land of liberty--and liberty had come to mean the right to disregard the rights of others.
In Japan, too, there had been changes, but Japan had received the gifts of science in a far different spirit. With her, science had been made to serve the more ultimate needs of the race, rather than the insane demand for luxuries.
The Japanese had applied to the human species the scientific principles of heredity, nutrition and physical development, which in America had been confined to plants and animals. The old spirit of Japanese patriotism had grown into a semi-religious worship of racial fitness and a moral pride developed which eulogized the sacrifice of the liberties of the individual to the larger needs of the people. Legal restrictions of the follies of fashion in dress and food, the prohibition of alcohol and narcotics, the restriction of unwise marriages, and the punishments of immorality were stoically accepted, not as the blue laws of religious fanaticism, but as requisites of racial progress and a mark of patriotism.
And while Japan showed no signs of the extravagant wealth seen in America, she was far from being poor. She had gained little from centralized and artificial industry, but she had wasted less in insane competition and riotous luxury.
But in Japanese life there was one unsolved problem. That was her food supply. Intensive culture would do wonders and the just administration of wealth and the physical efficiency of her people had eliminated the waste of supporting the non-productive, but an acre is but a small piece of land at most, and Japan had long since passed the point where the number of her people exceeded the number of her acres. A quarter of an acre would produce enough grain and coarse vegetables to keep a man alive, but the Japanese wanted eggs and fruit and milk for their children; and they wanted cherry trees and chrysanthemums, lotus ponds and shady gardens with little waterfalls.
[Illustration: In the nineteenth month of the war, the emblem of the Rising Sun was hoisted over Manila.]
Now if the low birth rate that had resulted when the examinations for parenthood were first enforced had continued, Japan would not have been so crowded, but after the first generation of marriage restriction the percentage of those who reached the legal standard of fitness was naturally increased. 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