PEACE OF THE PACIFIC.

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 18 October 1924, Page 7

PEACE OF THE PACIFIC.

RESTS OX NATIONAL TRIPOD. WELLS ON JAPANESE EXCLUSION The action of the United States in setting aside its gentlemanly understanding with Japan in the matter of immigration and excluding the Japanese altogether has greatly exercised the British mind. We believe (writes H. G. Wells in an American newspaper) that for all practical purposes the peace of the Pacific rests on the tripoct, America, Britain, Japan; we attached immense importance to the Washington agreement and the feeling of concord it developed; we abandoned the Anglo-Japanese alliance to Ainencan feeling, and, after ,a struggle at, home, the threat of the Singapore naval base was withdrawn. Our dominant idea was the collaboration, mutual trust and mutual -forbearance, of three great civilised Powers No country yet tolerates the free movement of peoples. Yet the force of human inventiveness fights against the system of restraint and barrier. •+ V 1 i ateSl OUr boundaries, become intolerably small to the new methods of communication, to the broadening general intelligence. s Our economic lives, in spite of tanffs and the most strenuous resisteirth ' SP,ead ° Ut to the ends of the' Financially the world is one No peoples on the earth travel and migrate more widely or would suffer more acutely m nnud and spirit from the ete u‘ lCtion , of international novement than the Americans—the' A mermans even more than the British 1 here is a plain antagonism of ideals here, between a venerable parochial ana a new planetary mind. i nIP,";' 01 - between the absolute exciusionist and the free mixer. Most °t us find ourselves somewhere intermediate between these extremes. The case of the exciusionist is based on just these increasing facilities of communication which make others think that at any cost the world must becojue one united system. ■ and closer intercourse is intensifying racial clash. It was all very well when only a few foreigners could travel with difficulty to one’s couistry but now they come in multitudes, they come to settle, they congest jn lumps too solid for assimilation. It is necessary, says the exciusionist, to make the barriers higher and stronger. Yet is this more than a temporary arrest of racial conflict in a world where finance is world-wide and eveiy people has a need, a necessity for the produce of lands unacceptable o it. f In a world, too, of increasing hygienic knowledge, in which populations tend to increase and overflow? Is anything more than the opening phase of a development of an antagonism whose natural end is war? It seems to me that the forces that make for material world unification, the forces of invention and' enlightenment, are now so great, various, and subtle that they cannot in the end be defeated. They may be delayed, but m the end they will, be stronger than any exclusion. The practical question before mankmd is how we can minimise race hostility, devise fair methods of co-opera-tion, and work out a mixed and various world society with a code of mutual tolerance and service for the common good. This is not to be done by ignoring race, and racial differences. The natural thought forms and dispositions and instinctive reactions of Northern Europeans and Jews, negroes and white, Indians and Chinese, vary subtly and profoundly. You can no more ignore differences o'f race than difference, of sex. They are things greatly intensified and supplemented by differences of tradition, training, and conditions, but when all such modifications are eliminated essential differences' remain. Intermarriage provides no remedy. Alan is by nature a fierce,, resentful being, of excessive desires and facile prejudices, and no society has ever existed or could ever exist without some sort of educational adaptation of this natural savage, some schooling and toning down of his hostile impulses. But the educational facilities of the small and limited past are as nothing to the educational necessities of the present time. If races are to be brought together, and not. merely jumbled together, or still more dangerously held apart, an educational effort has to be made on an altogether unprecedented scale. That, I take it, is the only way of escape from the chancy, disorderly, restricted and tragic life men are living noiv. The question of race, like every other question in human affairs, so soon as ive follow it up leads us —to the school? No! It does not bring us to the ’school as ive knoiv it, but to the site of the chool, the crying blank for a school that is yet to be. Get on ivith a school and college system commensurate Avith the enormous needs and dangers of this age of Avovld communication, or blunder and suffer. Teach everyone horn into the Avorld the history, of . mankind, the significance of racial differences; expand eA’ery individual imagination to the conception of the racial life as a great adventure .and to some some of Avhat it uiay achieve in the days to come. Replace the suspicious conseiwatism of ignoiance by the curiosity and generosity of Avide vision. These am" enormous demands. No community has vet •jpiead more than the thinnest A r eneer °’.touching over its AA’hole population. But the' alternative of doing so is to have the machinery and methods of tbe neAv age used to arm and intensify the passions of the Avorld. A Avorld no better educated.than this will never be very much better than this; it will be a Avorld of race mobs and lynching*, of oograms and race brigandage, of iT'ious struggles for disputed *"territorms and wars, and wars, and wars. H thev continue upon the present _nes l do not seo how a Avar hetAveon Jannn and the United States Em h° folded for many years. And until thev have made a great effort T do not see hoAv they nan net away from their present lines'of action.