A Solid White Front means Solid Yellow, Black and Brown Fronts

Dominion, Volume 19, Issue 119, 13 February 1926, Page 15

A Solid White Front means Solid Yellow, Black and Brown Fronts

c i — HONESTLY believe that if the whole attitude of white races to I coloured races could be entirely altered, if the white men would | always act in the spirit of giving equality of opportunity to those I who arc coloured, what appears to be the aggressive and unreason- • able attitude of coloured races would entirely change, and they would be found to be ready to discuss these important matters in a fair spirit, and with a due sense of all the difficulties surrounding them,” said Lord Willingdon at the Church Congress. “We have to help the coloured nations through their growing pains; to assist them to acquire a reasoned self-confidence: to infuse into them the spirit of public service, and to inspire them with every confidence that wc are sincerely desirous of assisting them to undertake the full responsibilities that they arc eager to obtain.” “There arc many voices to-day calling us in all sorts of ways and in all sorts of circumstances to show a united white front against peoples of other colour. Well, let us face the facts squarely,” said Mr. J. H. Oldl\am, dealing with the same topic. “A solid white front certainly and inevitably means a solid yellow front, and a solid brown front, and a solid black front; and that, in the end of the day, can have only one meaning. It means war. And the only way to prevent us from drifting to that disaster is that men of courage and of true vision should refuse to be entangled in the snares of racialism and a purely racial way of looking at questions, and should strive everywhere and always to ensure the triumph of the claims of humanity and justice, even when such striving brings them into opposition with men of their own race. “Who mav more fitly take the lead in rendering this service so indispensable to the future weirarc of mankind than the Christian Church? Mere

sentiment will not carry us far, but hard thinking, a firm hold of principle and courageous action might have a profound influence on the relations between the races.”

“We have always found it easy to make gestures of good will to foreign nations generally,” stated Lord Eustace Percy on the general question of international relations, “just because we have never made much effort to understand them individually. That is just what' our friends on the Continent have always complained of, and they will not complain the less if wc dignify our intellectual laziness with new, high-sounding titles.

“To-day it is not the diplomatists, but the ‘progressives,’ who tend to treat nations as if they were pawns on a chessboard. Nations are not ‘cadres in the international proletarian army’; they are not ‘members of the League’; they are themselves—bodies of men deeply marked by their origins, often but lately emerged from the passionate struggles of nationality, hardened by centuries of ruthless history, with their own peculiar inheritance of ambitions and prejudices, and their own habits of thought moulded by their own language. “These men feel that we deliberately ignore their hopes and fears; that we gloss over the record of their sufferings and hard achievements in the past; that, like the Duke in ‘As You Like It.’ we are concerned only to translate the stubbornness of their fortune into as quiet and as sweet a style as possible. To reduce all nations to a least common denominator, of scientific attainments, civilised sentiments, and humane aspirations is not to understand them.

“International understanding, like private friendship, can only grow in an atmosphere of reality, and the prime realities of foreign nations are their hardly-won political unitv under a common allegiance and the history which has made them what they arc.”