JAPANESE PROTECTORS

Evening Post, Volume LXXXVII, Issue 152, 29 June 1914, Page 15

JAPANESE PROTECTORS

A RAY OF LIGHT. SIR IAN HAMILTON'S SPEECH. (From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 15th May. It was, of course, very improper, as the Pall Mall Gazette points out, for General Sir lan Hamilton to say "what he thought of the future problems of the Pacific, for Sir lan is a soldier of tho Imperial General Staff and has only to see that the Empire's soldiers are fit, without troubling about tho iise for which they may be required. At the same time Sir lam's little speech in New Zealand, in which he spoke of the Pacific as "the meeting place, not of nations but of Continents," has served to make it clear hero that perhaps • after all there is something in the refusal of both Australia and New Zealaaid to accept the Japanese Navy as the- protectors of thenliberties. The Times has given more study to this question than any other paper appears to have done, and it takes the opportunity of hammering it home once more that the Australasian standpoint iis a real one and deserves to be considered. After quoting Sir lans speech, The Times says-;—-"No longer is the East prepared, in Matthew Arnold's phrase, to 'let the legions thunder past' and 'plunge in thought again.' In the United States, in Canada, in South Africa, the problem of the Asiatic immigrant is acute. He lives, as Sir lan Hamilton Tathef brutally puts it, on Tice and monc-poliseS business. Tho white trader cannot exist in competition with him. He can livd where the white man would starve. His whole being is one struggle to hoard infinitesimal profits against his return ,'to his- own country, free because he is rich, co to speak, of a far more immense and difficult problem —the conflict of East and West forsur--vival in a world whose empty places are getting filled up all too rapidly. . . . The homekeeping Englishman is apt to rofutse this problem even a thought. Tc the Australian or the New Zealander, living under the shadow of Japan and the Ea6t> one of a minute outpost planted by Europe in the midst of an ocean fringed by Asiatic countries, it is a. very different tiling. The zeal which Australia and,Ney Zealand have turned to the organisation of their own safety is the zeal of those who are convinced that they are in danger. We hope that these words of newborn wisdom will not be ignored or brushed aside by those whose duty it is to provide for the defence of the Empire. The Admiralty should weigh them. well. Unfortunately the disposition of our naval authorities, from Mr. Churchill downwards, has been rather to dismiss with an impatient wave of the hand the fears of ' Australia and New Zealand than to reassure them by making more than adequate provision for their safety. The Amglo-Japanese alliance may, in the view of British experts, be all the bulwark that is noeided for British intene&tß in the Pacific. But not all the eloquence at the command of the First Lord will over convince Australia, and New Zealand that it is so. And when, he adds the battle-cruiser New Zealand to the strength of the North Sea fleet; when ho hints to Australia that she "had much better send her battleships to European waters instead of keeping them on her own coasts; and when he commends to both the idea of an Imperial" squfldron based on Gibraltar, ho goes perilously near adding insult to the injury that they conceive him to have don© them."