The militarist party of Japan would rejoice at an international slashing of naval budgets, provided nothing was done to cut army expenditures and policies. Winning that, they will win Asia at a fraction of the price they had expected to pay.

After disarmament, Chang may turn the trick for Japan in three ways. He may allow her militarists to trump up a pretext for war, and he will offer only nominal resistance. Should Sun and his constitutionalists sweep the country, Chang might resort to this proce dure; otherwise not. He will find it simpler to sell off the assets of China, as the Peking Government grows more and more desperate for funds; and thus, in a few years, Japanese buyers will own Manchu-Mongolia by the highly respectable right of purchase. Should Should this prove too slow, a third method remains. Chang may come out for provincial autonomy, after the battleships have vanished. He may retain sundry wise men, yea, even college professors, to demonstrate to a dubious world that this is China's one true salvation. The wise men will cite the famous doctrine of self-determination. And they will make out an extraordinarily strong case; for, in the long run, provincial autonomy may really be the best solution. Chang of Mukden will secede from Chang of Peking. The new empire of the north will straightway enter into close alliance with Japan. And all will be over but the banzai.

Suppose finally that, after naval disarmament, Sun Yat-sen wins. What then? It is hazardous to make more than two broad conjectures, as the outcome of a constitutionalist victory must be highly complex. This much is sure, though: the restored Republic could not block Japan's expansion in Manchuria and Mongolia, as it lacks railroads, finance, technical staffs, and general organization. And, with British

and American navies negligible, Japan might declare war on a democratic China, on the ridiculous pretext that Sun is Bolshevist, precisely as it attacked the Maritime Provinces of Siberia. As for Sun himself, he would doubtless uproot British and American concessionnaires at a great rate, if not menaced by their battleships. And in this he would be aided by the fast-mounting hatred of the foreigner, among even the common folk of China.

Were disarmament to be followed by provincial autonomy, it is doubtful whether even the lives of foreigners would be safe in most regions. The World War shattered the white man's prestige and revealed the infamy of the Japanese militarists. China now follows Japan and India in her distrust of European civilization. The thoughts of Gandhi, the Hindu saint, and the poet Tagore are blazing up the dense valleys. The outcry against the Consortium, the thirty-million-dollar loan from native bankers to the Peking Government, last summer, and, above all, the wild enthusiasm in the south over Sun's extreme nationalism, are a few gusts that scurry ahead of the great storm which must some day break, once the restraint of naval force is withdrawn. Everybody who knows China seems to agree that, in the chaos following the creation of eighteen kingdoms, the foreign devils would suffer first and foremost.

V

Thus far we have noted only internal tendencies in China. Is there not hope that the prospect will brighten when we consider other possibilities? May not Japan, reassured by Anglo-Saxon disarmament, forsake her militant ways in Asia? And if China, no longer threatened by her neighbor, continues chaotic, may not the powers join to put her house in order, under some benev

olent scheme of international control? Alas for these hopes! The militarist party is still unbroken at Tokyo, and its counsel will prevail at the Washington Conference, where it will confound its adversaries with an argument borrowed from the very advocates of disarmament. Japan can defend her Asiatic policy with the greatest lesson of the World War. Her militarists can appeal to Mr. Frank I. Cobb's vigorous and accurate statement of it, in the August Atlantic:

'Nations that are rich are not defenseless. They contain in themselves all the elements of defense. They may have been defenseless in times when war was the exclusive business of professional soldiers, but all that has been changed. The elements of national defense are now the sum total of all the economic resources of the country plus all the man-power. . . .

'Economic resources can be easily and quickly translated into military resources; and a sound economic system is the essential element in any extensive military undertaking.'

Mr. Cobb correctly used this as an argument for America's disarming. Japanese war lords can use it to demonstrate Japan's need of dominating Manchuria and Mongolia, if not also a slice of Siberia. They can thus prove that their fatherland cannot even defend itself unless it acquires immense economic resources. To-day their country is perilously poor in the materials that make for strength. Her people no longer feed themselves, but import vast quantities of rice and millet. Most of her peasants make money only from silkworm culture. Unhappily, silk is a luxury whose value fluctuates widely, and imitations made from cotton already threaten its market. So a nation whose natural resources are mostly silkworms hangs by a thread. To survive, Japan must own coal, iron, cop

Can any American or Briton soberly advise the Japanese delegates that they should show true moral grandeur by choosing the second alternative? And, if you once grant the right of economic expansion, where else would you have Japan expand, if not due west?

We come now to the proposed international control of China, which some observers feel would at once restore order there and hold the Tokyo militarists in check. Here is no place to debate the broader merits of the plan. We have only to note its relation to disarmament, which is as clear as sunshine. So sincerely do the Chinese hate foreign domination, that international management could succeed only if backed up by a large army and navy. The day the first alien manager entered Peking, Sun Yat-sen's strength would be doubled. To the 1,700,000 troops of the tuchuns would be added the might of armed mobs and bandits innumerable; and we should be committed to a new benevolent militarism for years to

This brings us to the one obstacle to world peace which lies wholly within our own gates. We have most of the world's gold, most of the free capital, immense factories, and millions of skilled workers. The unbalance of trade has ruined our foreign trade with Europe; our exports and imports declined 50 per cent in the first seven months of this year; Germany is selling textiles 60 per cent cheaper than we can; German mills are underbidding Pittsburgh in our domestic steel mar

ket; our automobile factories are running at 57 per cent capacity; and five million workers are idle, as winter comes on. Meanwhile, taxes refuse to shrink, and battleships are being built, while our farmers see their minute profits devoured by abnormal freight-rates and our builders touch only the most urgent contracts. There is but one escape from the deadly combination of war-debts, an over-expanded factory system, and a money glut. New markets must be tapped quickly, new consumers found, new desires created. But where and how?

Not in Europe, for Europeans are finding it hard enough to fill their stomachs; and they can undersell us at almost every point. Not in Russia, where none has a dollar save for black bread. Not in South America, whose buying power is probably less than that of Texas, in spite of the large claims of sundry bank presidents whose knowledge of that continent and its people appears to have been derived from grammar-school geographies and smoking-room tales. Where, then? There remains only the Far East. China and Siberia can absorb billions of capital, much of which, as Mr. T. W. Lamont remarked, must eventually earn a thousand per cent. They can also consume billions' worth of manufactures; and, as their standards of living rise, these billions will become tens of billions. To those lands, then, our financiers and manufacturers must look for the only foreign trade that can restore our economic balance appreciably. Their logic is impeccable, granting the premise that we must look abroad for new markets.

But how dares any American financier invest millions in such chaos, where governments totter, intriguers plot new empires, and war lords revel in civil strife? Neither Peking nor Canton can protect him, and Tokyo will not. His alternatives, then, are clear: either he

must have his own country protect him with as much force as is necessary, or else he must stay out of Asia. As for the manufacturer and the exporter, he is vexed by this same dilemma and two further annoyances. He must undersell the British, Germans, and Japanese in China; and this he cannot do now save in a few monopolistic lines, such as cheap automobiles and sewing machines. And even when he can meet their prices, he cannot reap their profits, because Great Britain and Japan have exempted their nationals doing business in China from all income taxes and excess-profits taxes on their China trade. But these worries pale beside the chaos in China.

This chaos creates for the Republican party a terrible dilemma. Champion of the full dinner-pail, roaring factories, and hundred-per-cent dividends, - all excellent ideals! it has committed itself heart and soul to the utmost stimulation of foreign trade and foreign investments. Champion of general prosperity, it aims to reduce the cost of living, especially taxes, which are nine tenths military. The first goal demands a navy. The second demands the abolition of navies. And neither a navy nor an abolished one will guarantee success in the Far East!

Is it to be marveled at that some Republicans have lost interest in the Disarmament Conference, while others are losing sleep over it?

VI

Disarm and leave Asia to the Asiatics, or else run Asia and a huge fleet. This, when all is said and done, is the alternative that delays disarmament. It may be dodged for a while, but it cannot be evaded. It will not help to emit hypocritical shrieks over the wicked Japanese, whose imitation of our political ways is the sincerest flattery. Nor

will it serve any good end to shed crocodile tears over poor, down-trodden China, which is not a whit worse off than some of our own Southern states, man for man, road for road, town for town. Asia is Asia. It must work out its own salvation. Too far away and too huge to be controlled by us, who cannot even manage our own cities intelligently, its hundreds of millions can be swayed by us only under the compulsion of overwhelming force. They who are compelled will gain little. We who compel shall lose much in money and in reputation. Only a few

exploiters, white and yellow, will emerge with riches.

Some influential Republicans understand this and are ready to accept its implications. But the majority seem still under the spell of economic imperialism, or else hypnotized by the Japanese bogey manufactured by our yellow press. And so, while they may cry for world peace and the prosperity it must bring, they thwart it by refusing to accept the consequences of disarmament. If the Conference fails, they will probably have to share the guilt with the extreme militarists of Japan.

EARLY in August, the Washington correspondent of the Philadelphia Ledger announced that it was the intention of the United States Government to 'make the settlement of the Far Eastern situation a condition precedent to the discussion of the curtailment of armaments.' If this be so, supreme importance must attach to whatever scheme of settlement is eventually framed and proposed by the State Department. Seldom, indeed, have the prospects of peace in our time been more directly dependent upon the knowledge and breadth of vision of a few statesmen. America, because of her unchallengeable wealth and resources, holds the master-key to the gates of peace and war in the regions of the Pacific. If, at this juncture, her foreign policy is

based upon recognition of the realities of the Far Eastern situation (including recognition of the instinct of self-preservation which underlies Japan's expansion on the Asiatic mainland), the Conference should pave the way, at least, to what President Harding calls approximate disarmament,' and thus relieve the world of the burden and danger of acute naval rivalry.

At the outset it may be asked, why should America seek to make an international agreement for disarmament dependent upon the settlement of the Far Eastern question, more than upon the removal of any other potential cause of conflict? The answer lies obviously in the fact that every nation's foreign policy is inevitably inspired by the fundamental instinct of survival, which

compels it to seek and preserve, at all costs, national security. Also, that many things have happened during the past ten years to lead public opinion in the United States to the belief that America's security is menaced by Japan's rapid rise to the front rank of world powers and by the activities and ambitions of her military party.

When, after the Russo-Japanese War, the United States played the part of host and peacemaker at the making of the Treaty of Portsmouth (1905), the general sentiment of the American nation was one of unmistakable sympathy and friendship for Japan; but since then much has occurred to change this feeling into one of apprehension and increasing antagonism. First came the Russo-Japanese Entente of 1907, followed by the definite agreement of July, 1910, which made the Treaty of Portsmouth a dead letter and definitely abrogated the principle of the Open Door in Manchuria and Mongolia. Next came the humiliating fiasco of Mr. Secretary Knox's scheme for the neutralization of railways in Manchuria; and finally, the annexation of Korea by Japan. But more significant than all these indications of Japan's activities as a world power was her increasing insistence on the principle of racial equality, combined with the assertion of rights of migration to the American continent. Thus, before the revolution in China and the great war in Europe gave Japan new and unexpected opportunities for advancing her outposts and accelerating her economic penetration in the comparatively undeveloped regions of the Asiatic mainland adjacent to Korea, the Yellow Peril (as proclaimed by Homer Lea in the Valor of Ignorance) had begun to loom largely on the political horizon, and public opinion in America had become definitely imbued with the conviction that Japan's ambitions must involve a chal

lenge to Western civilization and, ultimately, a claim to the mastery of the Pacific.

The course of events during and since the great war the elimination of Russia as an Asiatic power, the increasing chaos in China, and the swift rise of the United States to leadership in the council of nations- has served to increase the points of contact and to accentuate the economic and political differences between the two nations which confront each other across the Pacific. The racial aspect of the antagonism thus created was emphasized at Versailles, and finds expression today in a widely prevalent belief in the idea of a 'color war,' wherein the forces of Pan-Asia (and even Pan-Africa), organized and led by Japan, will challenge and overthrow the dominant white race. Mr. Lothrop Stoddard's Rising Tide of Color, and other works of the same kind, have given form and substance to a Yellow Peril spectre, as fantastic in its way as Kaiser Wilhelm's famous vision of China's warlike millions ranged in battle array against the pale legions of the West.

The limits of this article do not permit, nor does the occasion require, any detailed exposition of the absurdity of this Pan-Asian delusion. In propounding their scheme for the settlement of the Far Eastern question to the Washington Conference, the American State Department and the British Foreign Office will have work and to spare in dealing with the actual and immediate difficulties of the situation. The theory of profound racial antagonism is obviously incompatible with the proclaimed intention of the British and American governments to substitute a spirit of coöperation and mutuality for the intense spirit of competition in solving the problems which arise out of the political and financial disorganization of China. It is a theory that cannot be