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, within the capacious interiors of which were packed the parts of aeroplanes as were the soldiers of the Grecian army in their wooden horse at Troy, for assembling and launching them.  But the engines of warfare which men had repeatedly claimed would make war so terrible as to end war, had failed to fulfill anticipations.  The means of defense and the rules of the game had kept pace with the means of destruction.  The flat tops of the warships, which served as alighting platforms for friendly planes, were heavily armored against missiles dropped from unfriendly ones.  The explosion of a bomb on top of a plate of steel is a rather tame affair, and guns sufficient to penetrate armor plate could not be carried on air-craft.  The big guns of battleships, which had for a time grown bigger and bigger, had now gone quite out of use, for the coming of the armored top had been followed by the toad-stool warship, which had a roof like an inverted saucer, and was provided with water chambers, the opening of the traps of which caused a sudden sinking of the vessel until the eave dipped beneath the water level and left exposed only the sloping roof from which the heaviest shot would glance like a bullet from the frozen surface of a pond.