Expenditures of the Russo-Japanese war / by Gotaro Ogawa.

NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR

vii

merce unites more than it separates those who participate in
it, and it remains to be seen whether international commerce
will act in the same way; but, in view of what modern war
means, the human race will deserve to perish, and much of
it will probably do so, if the forces of strife are allowed to get
the upper hand. Whether they will or not-whether the
recent economic changes will tend to reduce warfare or to
increase it-depends on the ability of nations to create and
maintain the instrumentalities that in the new state of the
world are necessary.
Certain it is that the feeling which prevails today, the
world over, is not one of security. The dread of further war
is greater than it was before I914. In some areas war still
prevails, in others peace is held by a precarious tenure and
in all it can be firmly established only by conscious and intelligent action by the states themselves. Mere exhaustion
holds war dogs temporarily in leash, but it will take more
than that to tame them as they must be tamed if peace is
to endure.
We here confront a wide difference between the several
states in comparative desire for peace and disposition to
maintain it. One portentous fact is the grim determination
of Russian communists to extend their system by crude force
from state to state. Bolshevism is government by the few,
and largely the bad, masquerading as government for and by
the people. In its mother country, Russia, the economic
measure by which it began its career was confiscation of private wealth-in itself an ultra-democratic measure. If this
had brought in a true communism, it would have been a
ruthless and unjust measure for creating a peace-loving state.
Democracy, socialism, communism and bolshevism all appear in the aftermath of the war. The first of them makes
for future peace and so does even the conservative element
in the second, while all else in the series means certainty of
civil strife and danger of international war.
By a compulsion that there was no resisting, the war forced
the nations of the Entente into economic cooperation with