The choice between the two forms really depends upon the circumstances of each case.  We have to consider whether the political object is in fact limited, whether if unlimited in the abstract it can be reduced to a concrete object that is limited, and finally whether the strategical conditions are such as lend themselves to the successful application of the limited form.

What we require now is to determine those conditions with greater exactness, and this will be best done by changing our method to the concrete and taking a leading case.

The one which presents them in their clearest and simplest form is without doubt the recent war between Russia and Japan.  Here we have a particularly striking example of a small Power having forced her will upon a much greater Power without “overthrowing” her—­that is, without having crushed her power of resistance.  That was entirely beyond the strength of Japan.  So manifest was the fact that everywhere upon the Continent, where the overthrow of your enemy was regarded as the only admissible form of war, the action of the Japanese in resorting to hostilities was regarded as madness.  Only in England, with her tradition and instinct for what an island Power may achieve by the lower means, was Japan considered to have any reasonable 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.