World Policy in the Pacific.

Cromwell Argus, Volume XLI, Issue 2206, 1 August 1910, Page 5

World Policy in the Pacific.

TRUE CENTRE OF INTERNAT102?AL STRATEGY. Dr T. Miller Maguire, the wellknown authority on strategy, in an interesting paper which lie has written on ' The New Pacific'says lie regards the Pacific as the true centre of the world's strategic gravity. "There have been Press and Imperial Conferences lately," says this outspoken critic, " which have been the very acme of absurdity. As an eloquent Canadian said, they were mountains of labour and only brought forth mice. Indeed, the Blue Book reporting the proceedings of the Imperial Conference is a masterpiece of the inane, and its authors seem utterly unaware of the present state of international strategy. They assume that it is quite impossible that Japan or America should ever be against us. They ignore the future of China. Look at the map of Empire. The wiseacres in London discussed strategy without reflecting that, even as after the discovery of America the centre of world policy shifted from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, so since IS'JO the centre of world policy has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Imperial and Press Conferences ignore the importance of India, which has hitherto been regarded as the aim of every great conqueror, from Alexander to Tamerlane and from Vasco da Gama to Napoleon and Skobeloff. See the relation of India, Ceylon, Singapore, and Hongkong to that great ocean ' whose shores are fringed with gold,' as Alexander the Great told his soldiers. I am glad lo sec that Australian and Canadian statesmen are only too anxious to adopt universal military service, to get up navies, to put an' end to gambolling, and secure generations of healthy and high-spirited mothers lit to give birth to men and rear warriors. I fear that our recent indifference to the West Indies and the Mediterranean and the Pacific lias diminished our prestige and enhanced that of Japan and the United States. It is very well indeed that Australia and Canada, therefore, are ready to take a large share in the defence of the Pacific, and are not under the influence of antimilitarist cant, and are enamored of obligatory universal service, the only military system that ever yet enabled any country to acquit itself well in any serious international crisis. Germany is not everything, and the preposterous policy of virtually withdrawing our fleets with modern armaments from the Pacific (to confront Germany instead) amazed the merchants of all other lands."

After pointing oul that China lias begun to admire skill in arms, wants a modern licet, and means to arm on modern lines in order to assert its sovereign rights iu the J'aee of the world. Dr Maguire continues : With all the fervor of a true Celt Dr Maguire describes the people of the United Kingdom as "our misled people —torpid with wealth, violent with ignorance, besotted with the worship of games, despising the] cult of brain-power, learning and science." Is ow it is net to be supposed for a moment that Chinese or any other colored races will stand the stigma put upon them by South Africans, Americans, and Australasians one moment more than is necessary. Hence I cannot see how their enforced isolation can be maintained except at the cost of a series of wars. Their question is why the white race want supremacy. How it is to be maintained? The answer is "By force." But suppose the colored or yellow races organise and mobilise superior force, then the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons will Ite challenged, and perchance lost from llong-kong to Auckland and Panama and from the Cape of Good Hope to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Whether our race will be able to hold its own depends largely, he adds, on the extent to which we are prepared in advance of the dread contingency of war.