It is, however, likely that the force of circumstances may expedite this process of education. The articles of the coming peace are guaranteed to contain a provision for general disarmament; and so far as Europe is concerned, this will be a work of necessity and not of supererogation. Professor Delbrück, for instance, has come to acknowledge that the “derided notions” of disarmament, hitherto “entertained only by persons of no account,” are likely to be raised to “the position of the ruling principle of our time.”[49] His conversion is due to the fact that the war will leave the belligerents of Europe in a financial position which will not only make the increase of armaments impossible, but will require the very drastic reduction of their military establishments. The only danger to the process of disarmament lies in the circumstance that two of the belligerent powers, the United States and Japan, have been so little crippled by the war that they are in a position and may get into the mood to maintain large armaments. It is useless to obscure from ourselves the further circumstance that these two powers that are in a position to afford large military establishments look upon one another with a considerable measure of suspicion despite their recent association upon the same side in the war, and the formal professions of mutual good-will that have latterly been made. It must be borne in mind that Japan is still mainly dynastic in government and consequently imperialistic in spirit, that its economic development seems to require an expansion of marketing opportunities, and that its over-population will stimulate emigration. In these matters there is plenty of inflammable stuff; and we should be guilty of not facing the facts of the case, did we not perceive that by reason of the attraction which Western America has for the Japanese emigrant, and of the peculiar interest which America has taken in the welfare of China, situations of very great peril may arise between Japan and the United States. It is upon such a state of the case that the argument for universal military service in America will be based; and indeed must be based; as it is inconceivable that any American in his senses should apprehend any danger from the other side of the Atlantic. The certain democratisation of Europe and the virtual certainty of the impossibility on financial grounds of any considerable war-like enterprise on the part of the European nations make the contingency of a Transatlantic war unthinkable at the present time, or indeed at any future time. This, of course, pre-supposes that the causes of friction likely to arise from the national underwriting of private foreign investments will be removed by a common understanding that the private ventures of capital abroad are made at its own risk. Footnote 49: _Prüssische Jahrbucher_ (November, 1917).