Asbhurton Guardian Magna est Verits et Prævalebit SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1909. A GREAT OPPORTUNITY.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume XXXI, Issue 7916, 2 October 1909, Page 2

Asbhurton Guardian Magna est Verits et Prævalebit SATURDAY, OCTOBER 2, 1909. A GREAT OPPORTUNITY.

Just now there are circumstances which, taken all together, seem to constitute one of the most remarkable opportunities ever presented to statesmen. In the Old World millions of men are withdrawn from industrial life and hundreds of millions of pounds sterling are expended on unreproductive purposes, because certain nations, of the fillers of certain nations, believe that they have interests which are opposed to each other. Perhaps Great Britain and Germany occupy the chief places in this category; perhaps, indeed, but for them and what are asi sumed to be their deep industrial and imperial antagonisms, the waste and misapplication of human capability and human wealth to which we have referred, would be ninety per centum l&ss than they are at the present moment. Tlje pity of all this is realised, too, by many men in both empires. A month or two ago Sir Edward Grey, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, very expressly and at some length referred to the subject in the House of Commons. He deplored tho want of human wisdom and the want of mutual international trust that led to the ap- , palling misexpenditure of energy and wealth; and his sentiments are shared by millions of British men and women. The same may be said of the German people, apart from their official national politics. Only the other day, a cable message received from Berlin set forth that a retiree German official, Herr yon Rath, had contributed to the Deutsche Revue an article on the reminiscences of Herr Friedrich yon Holstein, who in 1906 retired from the position of Chief ofj the Political Department of the German Foreign Office, after having helped with his counsel four Imperial Chancellors, beginning with Bismarck. Herr Holstein, who died in May of the present year, was a strong opponent of the German policy of unlimited naval expansion. "The main thing (he said, on one occasion) is to expose the lying, treacherous fallacy embodied in the statement that every fresh ship is an addition to German power, when every fresh ship causes England—to say nothing of France — to build two ships." At another time, less than two years ago, he spoke of "the pernicious, costly naval fever in Germany as a raging, dangerous disease. It had fed upon the groundless fear of an attack on Germany by England." And intelligent, observant Englishmen who have mixed much with the German people in Germany know that Herr Holstein's sentiments are not merely his own, but those also of millions of his countrymen.

Yet there is some reason, too, for the policy of the German official class, for, in its ultimate analysis, it means provision for securing more markets and more room for the German people -^especially for the surplus population. One of the saddest pities in the whole matter is that these necessities of Germany might be peacefully met from within the British Empire with magnificent mutual advantage to both peoples, yet the statesmen of either people seem not to see the opportunity. The German Empire has more people than it has room for; the British Empire, especially in Australia, has immeasureable areas lying undeveloped for lack of population. The British Motherland herself has not the 6p_are people of the kind that are required to meet the necessity of the case; and there is a great and growing apprehension that Australia's emptiness will tempt either China, or Japan, separately or together, in the near future. This, in its turn, .entails much unreproductive expenditure and disturbing potential preparation on the part of Britain and Australia, whose people will not listen to the proposition that the international circumstances might be changed, and Australia industrially developed, by the wholesale introduction of yellow men as workers.

These considerations and contingencies are assuredly formidable enough; but surely statesmen need not stand staring at them as with their faces to a dead-wall. Surely it ia possible, surely it is practicable to devise and carry out a great international scheme for colonising Australia's unpeopled spaces with Germany's surplus population. Germans are already coming in driblets to Queensland; but why should they not do so by the million, under international organisation and compact; j not, of course, to settle in Australia ;as Imperial German colonists, but.as [ Australian settlers and citizens of the British Empire, as their compatriots have done (without international organisation) in America ? In this way, Australia would bo assured of becoming soon and permanently, all throiigh, a white man's country; the commerce of the world would receive a tremendous impetus, and the international situation in Europe would become" a hundredfold more favourable to industrial progress, to assured peace and to permanent prpsperity. Perhaps British, Australian and German statesmen with suffi cent imagination and sufficent initiative will, by-and-by, turn their attention, # and that of their compatriots, to this great subject. When they do, they will, if they do so with success, surely render a great and memorable service to their countries and their kind.