America has before her certain definite problems of foreign policy--Japanese immigration into the United States and the Philippines; concessions granted to foreigners in Mexico; the question of disorder in that country; the relations with Hayti (which will bear on the question of America's subject nationality, the negro); the exemption of American ships from tolls in the Panama Canal; the exclusion of foreign shipping from "coastwise" trade with the Philippines. It would be possible to draw up plans of settlement with regard to each item which would be equitable. But the development of foreign policy (which, more than any other department of politics, will fix the quality of American society in the future) will not depend upon the more or less equitable settlement of those specific questions. The specific differences between England and Germany before the War were less serious than those between England and America--and were nearly all settled when war broke out. Whether an issue like Japanese immigration or the Panama tolls leads to war will not depend upon its intrinsic importance, or whether Britain or Japan or America make acceptable proposals on the subject. Mr ex-Secretary Daniels has just told us that the assertion of the right to establish a cable station on the Island of Yap is good ground for risking war. The specific issues about which nations fight are so little the real cause of the fight that they are generally completely forgotten when it comes to making the peace. The future of submarine warfare was not mentioned at Versailles. Given a certain state of mind, a difference about cables on the Island of Yap is quite sufficient to make war inevitable. We should probably regard it as a matter of national honour, concerning which there must be no argument. Another mood, and it would be impossible to get the faintest ripple of interest in the subject. It was not British passion for Serbian nationality which brought Britain to the side of Russia in 1914. It was the fear of German power and what might be done with it, a fear wrought to frenzy pitch by a long indoctrination concerning German wickedness and aggression. Passion for the subjugation of Germany persisted long after there was any ground of fear of what German power might accomplish. If America fights Japan, it will not be over cables on Yap; it will be from fear of Japanese power, the previous stimulation of latent hatreds for the strange and foreign. And if the United States goes to war over Panama Canal tolls, it will not be because the millions who will get excited over that question have examined the matter, or possess ships or shares in ships that will profit by the exemption; it will be because all America has read of Irish atrocities which recall school-day histories of British atrocities in the American Colonies; because the "person," Britain, has become a hateful and hostile person, and must be punished and coerced.