Our National Defense: The Patriotism of Peace

by George Hebard Maxwell

The economic conditions created by the Asiatic in America are more dangerous and difficult of adjustment than any problem resulting from the military or naval strength of any Asiatic nation so long as their people in times of peace will stay in Asia. But they will not stay in Asia of their own accord, and they will not be forced to do so. We must face not only the problems that will arise from a large Asiatic population on the Pacific Coast of the United States, but in South America, Central America, and Mexico.

In a few generations the Japanese will control the northern Pacific shores of South America. Peru will come to be in reality a Japanese country. The Japanese will control because they will be in a majority, just as they now constitute a majority of the population of Hawaii. They will dominate the Indian population and will absorb or supplant the Spanish just as we have done in California. In the course of time the Japanese will control Mexico in the same way, unless we control it ourselves.

It does not follow that we could not live at peace with the Japanese, if they controlled South America and Mexico, as we now live at peace with them when they only control Japan, Formosa, Sakhalin, Korea, and their sphere of influence in Manchuria, as well as Tsing Tau and their Pacific Islands.

But if we are to do so, it can only be done by meeting their economic competition and establishing within our own territory a system of physical and mental development, a social and economic system, and a system of military defense, that will not only be equal but superior to theirs.

The conflict between the races of Asia and the races of America is the age-old competition to test which is the stronger race. The fittest will survive. We cannot defend ourselves by temporary exclusion, as we have tried to do with the Chinese. It is only a question of time when China will emerge from the slumber of the centuries and provide herself with all the implements of modern warfare necessary to insist upon the same treatment for her people that we accord to other nations.

It may be a long time before an armed conflict between the United States and Japan is precipitated, but it is inevitable, unless the national policy advocated in this book is adopted. War between this country and Japan within the next forty years, unless the present trend is checked, is as inevitable as it has been at all times during the last forty years between France and Germany, with this difference:

The present European war is the result of primary causes that were so deeply rooted in wrong and injustice, that no human power could eradicate them. It is different with Japan. We have no long standing or deeply rooted controversy with Japan and we need never have if we meet the economic problem involved in this great racial competition between Asia and America. It is coming upon us, however, with the slow moving certainty of a glacier, and meet it we must. We must prevail or be overwhelmed, and unless we can face the economic conflicts involved and triumph in them, it is useless for us to undertake to hold our ground by militarism alone.

The fact undoubtedly is that of all three of the plans now before the people of the United States for national defense or for preserving peace, the most dangerous and deceptive is that of the militarists, for a bigger standing army and a bigger navy. It would create a false and misleading feeling of security from danger which would becloud the real problems involved and make their solution more difficult, if not impossible.

Japan to-day has the most efficient military system of any nation of the world. This statement refers to the system. Other nations may have larger armies, but Japan's military system, like that of Switzerland, is fitted into and matches with her whole social, commercial, and economic system. It is a part of the very fiber of her national being, and not an excrescence, as is our standing army.

And behind this she has the most adaptable, industrious, and physically and mentally efficient and vigorous people of the world. The danger of war between the United States and Japan is not so much a present as a future danger. Whether it is in the near future or the far future depends largely on accident.