ONE FLAG, ONE RACE

Evening Post, Volume XCVIII, Issue 147, 19 December 1919, Page 6

ONE FLAG, ONE RACE

Our Australian correspondent shows, in yesterday's issue, that the problem of the German settlements in Australia, is a very difficult one. These settlements are more or less exclusively German, are vain of the fact, "refuse to mix," and are " practically little bits of Germany." They were thoroughly Prussian before the war was declared, and thereafter they became virulently antiBritish. Our correspondfent states:

They maintained their luiguage and their institutions, refused to call themselves British or Australian, and drank the Kaiser's health on the Kaiser's birthday. But they were very good, industrious settlers, and Australia, until 1914, was very pleased with them. But even 'an economically perfect colonist becomes obnoxious when ho turns against the flag of a country of whfch he is a prosperous inhabitant; therefore Australia has been compelled to take action against Australia's Huns, and has sufpresseii their special schools and the teaching of the German language. If Australia had tried all the suppressive measures employed by the Prussians against the Poles, she ■would have used expropriation and deportation. But as Australia is not Prussia, and as the Australian way of dealing with a hostile racial minority is not khe Prussian way, Australia is compelled to ask herself not only what self-interest suggests, .but what course of treatment satisfies justice-with-mercy.

When Prussians and Russians suppressed Polish schools and mads war on the Polish language, Australasian sympathy was, no doubt, with the Poles. But the circumstances were different. Polish title deeds date back centuries; so do the title deeda of other European races who, through some cause, or accident, are subject, or become subject to another people. If the Germans in Australia had been planted there for years or centuries before . the British flag arrived, if they were effective occupiers who merely passed under British rale as a result of political misadventure, then they and their customs and race-ha-bits and educational ' systems would possibly have as much claim on sympathy as did the Poles. And in that case the Australian Government would have found it difficult or impossible to adopt, in peacetime, the normal Prussian policy of suppressing the culture and language of a ,subject race. But tho Germans in Australia have no claims of prior or historic possession. Australia did not go. into their country.; they came into hers. They cams to a land of freedom, offering them every reasonable facility to be absorbed as freemen. And when, instead of accepting the common lot, ,they segregated themselves and reproduced "little bits of Germany" in nonGerman Australia, they adopted an anti-national attitude towards the land of their adoption—an attitude which certainly would have led to trouble in generations to come, if the mine had not been sprung in the public eye, most fortunately, by the outbreak of war in 1914. War has called attention to tho im-national self-segregation in Australia of race-units whose political allegiance is to Berlin instead of to the national organisation into which they have introduced themselves. In a new and democratic country, such a development is a danger either in war or in peace, and is contrary to nation-building ideals. In a virgin land the aim is to build up' a race, not races within races, and sertainly not race-units that are politically disaffected.

If an old nation happens to include a- Polandj the ruling element should be regardfpl, justly and mercifully, of Eolish rights ; but a young nation should on no account invite tenders for the creation of new Polands within herself. Therefore the Australian Government has rightly hit the German schools. Why should a nation deliberately invite the bi-lingual danger? Why should a- body politic be inoculated with neutral or malignant cysts obstructive of the free flow of its life-blood?