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. The danger could be removed entirely if the American people would substitute intelligent study of the problem for bumptious conceit, and concerted action on right lines for aimless talk. Unless we do that our ultimate fate is as inevitable as that of Rome when she vainly strove by militarism alone to protect a decadent nation against the onslaughts of virile races. Our fate will not be so long delayed because we are now crowding into a decade the events that once evolved slowly through a century. We may reach in forty years a condition of relative weakness as against opposing forces which Rome reached only after four hundred years.