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

NOTE BY THE DIRECTOR

The plans of the Division of Economics and History of the
Carnegie Endowment for International Peace have been
transformed by the World War. Problems now calling for
study transcend in importance those with which this Division
has been dealing and material for research and record so far
transcends any that was formerly available that it will demand
almost exclusive attention for some years to come.
The process of warfare itself is now so unlike that of former
days that many military rules of the past have gone into the
scrap basket. The late war ended when its deadliest tools
had barely been brought into action. The peoples have
fought as they had worked, by machinery; mechanical and
chemical engines of destruction have decided the result and
will decide in like manner the result of all wars of the future.
Machine shops and chemical laboratories will so largely determine what armies shall win that fighting strength will
be as much a matter of available capital and of science in
applying it as of numbers of troops and strategy in directing
them. It is safe to say that the death-dealing arts and instruments will far surpass in destructiveness those which made
the late war so deadly, and to a soldier of the future the order
to march into a cloud of poisonous gas and a whirlwind of
missiles will resemble an order to plunge into the rapids of
Niagara. This is one central and obvious fact which the
war has taught us and it has many corollaries, some of which
have to do with the increased costs of war and the importance
of the particular resources that make a nation powerful for
offense and defense; but there are less conspicuous economic
facts which are more fundamental, since they may determine
where and when, if at all, wars shall hereafter occur.
Causes of warfare are always partly economic and those
which incited the recent one were mainly so. The business
plans of a powerful state reached to the ends of the earth
and so crossed and interlaced the claims of other states that
some writers, then and afterwards, pronounced the war inevitable. If we assume a settled purpose on the part of such a
V