RAFFLES' VISION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVIII, Issue 156, 3 July 1937, Page 1 (Supplement)

RAFFLES' VISION.

GREATNESS OF SINGAPORE. VITAI< LINK IN GREAT CHAIN. (By MARC T. GREENE.) When Stamford Raffles, having loet his high poet of Governor of Java as. a result of England's ill-advised bartering of that rich island for Ceylon, found himself relegated to the unimportant post of Ben Cool en, in Sumatra, he did not relax his discontented lethargy and let blundering bureaucracy carry on with its policy of sabotage. On the contrary, he sought for some way of restoring British prestige and rebuilding a badlyshattered Oriental empire. Looking across the Malacca Straits he spied a fiat island, swampy, pest-ridden and seemingly not of much value to anybody. It was a part of Malaysia, but the personal property of a couple of local ra ja.iiß. Raffles purchased the island, after gaining a grudging and much criticised assent from home. Few thought of the acquisition as of any value or of the money expended as anything but thrown away. But this far-sighted pioneer of empire well knew what he was about. For he saw that here lay a strategic point, a meeting-place of all who voyaged from the West to the East or from the rising sun to the setting, even from the north to the south and back again, a true "Crossroads of the East," as men know Singapore to-day. That was a hundred years ago and more, and though Stamford Raffles was discredited and knew little vindication in his lifetime, his name is honoured today wherever the Union Jack reminds all men that here is England. For Singapore, prosperous Crown Colony, has become an important and a significant bit of the Empire, a vital link in the great chain, a meeting-place of the world and the ages. Through its long history it has known many ups and downs, alternating prosperity and depression. But, like Hongkong, it has grown more virile with each change, and to-day, what with the "boom" in rubber and tin, it is achieving a prosperity approaching that of the lush years of the final '20's. Preparedness. And yet the main interest of the Empire in Singapore to-day, particularly the Empire in the Southern Hemisphere, is in its defensive strength. Pity it is that such a thing must be so, that the energies and the thoughts of men must so often and in so many places be turned to something other than the arts and the interests of peace. But the facts have to be faced, and, here at the "Crossroads of the East," they are iron facts that suffer no evading. Singapore, like some especially vital part of the human body, must be protected against the possible storm lest general disaster follow close upon an exposure of weakness. If it; is true that a well-prepared England is the best guarantee of European peace—and who can doubt it as long as mad dogs can run wild and threaten to leapt the highest fence?—then a strong Britain in the East is equally as assurance of peace there, and no less in the southern Pacific. Deplorable as it may be, preparedness has become the better part of valour. Thus nobody shrinks from an expenditure of 12,000,000 Straits dollars at Singapore and probably a couple of million more ere the plans are fully carried out, any more than Hongkong shirks a sum only less lavish in order that the V vn together may stretch across the Asiatic side of the Pacific a barrier that . discourage the most imperialism. "fcgressive . Little Seen of Great Base. then » is carrying on a.pace with the development of the big base. * oil do not see a great deal of it as you enter the Straits, either from the east or the west, although you are well aware that all these pretty little hilly palmfringed islets that cluster about the former like a hanging of jade necklaces conceal somewhere more than one big and efficient gun. The main dockyards' and barracks and other buildings of the I base are around on the north side of the island, strategically tucked away in the shelter of the higher land along the narrow waterway between the Crown 1 Colony and the Unfederated State of •Tohore on the mainland of the Malay Peninsula. As you drive from the city along a splendid metalled boulevard to the new granite causeway that connects the island with the little territory of the eccentric Sultan, whose pranks have caused the closing to him of the colony after six o'clock in the evening, you come presently to a high wire fence and a well-guarded gate. This is hard by the island end of the causeway, and through this gate you do not pass without permissio/i from the highest authority, because this is the entrance to the great Singapore naval base, and naval bases, in the Empire or elsewhere, are not places where civilians are encouraged to prowl about. However, there is no particular secret j about what is going on, in general, nor is the base primarily a place of fortifications. It is somewhat such a place as Devonport, given the difference in, physical environment, some twenty times expanded, let us say, a sheltered place where there is to be provision for the repair and refitting of many great ships, equipment for every form of military defence, facilities for the housing and provisioning of thousands of men, likewise, and of vital importance, arrangements for one of the world's largest air establishments. From this vital point it will be possible to dispatch powerful expeditions of land, sea, and/or air forces to any point on a moment's notice, and that is why the strength of the Singapore base is of such import to the southern Dominions. It may never be needed. Let us all pray it will not. But it is there, and in the very fact we find assurance of security and thus surfease from apprehension. Good Times. Between the large-scale construction work of many sorts going on here, and the great improvement in the tin and rubber markets Singapore comes now into new life, the most marked prosperity in nearly a decade, a restoration of something like the oft-talked of "good old days." Good times are here for all the innumerable peoples of the East and West and North and South, who live in amity in this melting-pot of the world. The Chinese, of course, greatly predominate, and they share with their fellowcountrymen of British Hongkong a measure of well-being that has never come to the Chinese in any other of the many parts of the world to which they have immigrated. You find in Singapore, then, the same ready political and commercial co-operation between British and Chinese that is so distinct a feature of the life and affairs of the other Crown Colony and which, as there, will assure the future prosperity of Singapore if no general disturbance in the Pacific interferes with it. The strength of the new naval base will go far to avert any such unfortunate eventuality.