"Working night and day; so is the rest of Europe. It'll be Armageddon
with a vengeance if it comes to war."

"What chance do you see?"

"I see two chances," said Oliver slowly: "one, that they may be afraid
of America, and may hold their hands from sheer fear; the other that
they may be induced to hold their hands from charity; if only they can
be made to understand that co-operation is the one hope of the world.
But those damned religions of theirs---"

The girl sighed, and looked out again on to the wide plain of
house-roofs below the window.

The situation was indeed as serious as it could be. That huge Empire,
consisting of a federalism of States under the Son of Heaven (made
possible by the merging of the Japanese and Chinese dynasties and the
fall of Russia), had been consolidating its forces and learning its own
power during the last thirty-five years, ever since, in fact, it had
laid its lean yellow hands upon Australia and India. While the rest of
the world had learned the folly of war, ever since the fall of the
Russian republic under the combined attack of the yellow races, the last
had grasped its possibilities. It seemed now as if the civilisation of
the last century was to be swept back once more into chaos. It was not
that the mob of the East cared very greatly; it was their rulers who had
begun to stretch themselves after an almost eternal lethargy, and it was
hard to imagine how they could be checked at this point. There was a
touch of grimness too in the rumour that religious fanaticism was behind
the movement, and that the patient East proposed at last to proselytise