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THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUCCESS
There can be no traditional bond, no cordial alliance, no sticking together in the future because of common experiences, perils, and victories in the past. In the course of the unremitting struggle of political powers-which is like that of beasts in the wilderness, pieving and feeding upon cach other, each devouring what it can-friendships and alliances are but temporary expedients and attitudes, enforced by common interests and suggested by need and desire. The moment the actual occasion for inutual assistance has passed, the reason for as well as the safety of the companionship has also passed. For what governs politics is never friendship, but only temporary co-operation and assistance, inspired by common threats or by parallel hopes of gain, and supported by the natural selfishness of cach of the allies. There is no such thing as an altruistic alliance. Loyalties do not exist. And where friendship is pleaded, that is only a mask. There must be no “Union Now."
So it was that Japan, at the beginning of the present century, wooed and gained the support of Britain to weaken Russia in Persia, in the Near East, and at thc Dardanelles. Then, in the first World War, Japan became the ally of England and Russia, together with France, in order to drive Germany out of China (Kiaochow) and take possession of Germany's Pacific islands. Whereas in the present struggle, Japan has become the ally of Germany, has conquered France in Indo-China, and seems to be seriously threatening the colonial empire of England. Apparently the ancient Hindu political wisdom of the first millennium B.c. is still a good key to the political thinking of Asiatic peoples.
It is a remarkably good key, also, to international politics throughout the world; for its utterly unmoral, premoral point of view brings out, and formulates with the cold precision of a kind of political algebra, certain fundamental natural laws that govern political life, no matter where. England, for example, before the first World War, discovered that she had to ally her
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