EAST AND WEST.

Evening Star, Issue 19318, 3 August 1926, Page 6

EAST AND WEST.

“Is our civilisation a failure? Or is tKe Caucasian played out?” Those are the questions which will certainly be canvassed hy the first Congress of PanAsian delegates, now being held in Nagasaki, Japan, to insist on the doctrine of racial equality and denounce white domination. The Congress will probably find it an easy matter to answer both questions in the affirmative. To a not inconsiderable extent it will have the authority of Europe for so doing. The tragic experience of the Groat War did not increase the respect of Asia for Europe, and, with the divisions and depression that are still continuing, it has not advanced Europe in its own esteem. A cheerful German has written a book which is a philosophical argument intended to prove that the Western Continent hag had its day, and that nothing now lies before it hut decline; there has been a morbid craze for the book among his countrymen. Europe is undoubtedly sick, and the ambitious Oriental, contrasting its troubles with the new signs of life and the enormously greater natural resources of his own continent, has some reason to say “ The fault is in ourselves if we are underlings.” Asia contains more than half the population of the globe. Both the arts and the religion of the West were (derived from there. At intervals its armed hordes overran the West., spreading terror and desolation. Yet to-day more than half the continent and rather loss than half its population are under Western rule, the rulers being British, French, Russians, Portuguese, Dutch, and Americans. That is not a condition which is likely to last indefinitely. The East has come to feel that it is as good as the West. In the present state of European divisions and weakness not a few Orientals have become firmly convinced, doubtless, that it is better. “ In Asia,” a writer in the ‘Round Table’ has pointed out, “the war has given birth to a national consciousness in Russia, India, China, and Turkey which is giving them new powers of resistance to European control. Fifty years ago her peoples were the passive purveyors and purchasers who made the Eastern market the source of so much European wealth. They have now become imbued with European notions of political and economic independence. They, too, are worshipping at the altar of national self-sufficiency. They, too, are building their own factories, in which they are manufacturing goods for their own needs instead of buying them from Europe—and they are doing it largely with the aid of European machinery and European capital. They, too, are even imitating their European tutors in erecting tariff barriers of their own against European merchandise.” In the past the West has lived to no small extent on the East, but that time is coming to an end. The victory of Japan over Russia in the Manchurian War has also taught the East that it can hope to prevail over Western nations even in material strength. That is one side of the position. The other is that there is far less natural cohesion and identity of conditions and aims among the peoples of Asia than there is even among those of divided Europe. There is no such thing as an Asiatic in any typical sense. “ The primitive Aino and the besotted Naga stand at the bottom of the scale, at the top of which pose the Indian Brahmin and the Chinese Buddhist. Socially there are men in the lowest stage who thrive on offal—cannibalism alone is unknown—and in the

highest who are as epicurean as a French gourmet.” The prospect of the present, purely unofficial conference, composed of the extremists inast opposed to foreign rule, has been a good deal of an embarrassment, it has been stated, to the Japanese Government, which would gladly have prohibited it if, it could have found an excuse. An orgy of wild speaking is to be expected from it; it will be a gleeful occasion on which to let off steam for incendiaries from all parts of Asia, ■'made happier if their expenses are paid by the Bolshevists. But when we survey the list of the countries represented, it is not much that they have in common. The Chinaman has no love for the Japanese; the Korean’s first instinct is to throw bombs at him. The Afghans have done nothing for the Hindus except to invade their territory .whenever they have not been prevented by the British Raj. A section of Filipinos ’ waxes violent against the oppression of American government, while another section, the Moros, declares that if those petitioners are ever made its rulers the archipelago will be no place for them. The students who cry “China for the Chinese” have been described as frankly materialistic. It has been remarked that “whereas the intellectual classes of the country received John Dewey and Bertrand Russell, both materialists, with a great deal of enthusiasm, they listened to Tagore, the mystic, with merely polite interest. Dewey and Russell are quoted on every hand; Tagore almost never.” The pride of Hinduism is still in its spirituality. Gandhi could not keep the Hindus and Mohammedans for more than a few months to a common purpose. A greater than Gandhi will bo needed to bring the discussions of this Pan-Asian Congress to any effective focus.