WHAT COLOUR?

Hawera Star, Volume XLVIII, 10 January 1925, Page 3

WHAT COLOUR?

PACIFIC OF THE FUTURE. PRpFESSOR AS PROPHET. Ramsay Traquair. professor of architecture at McGill University, Montreal, dons a pro,pilot's robes in Scribner s Magazine, and vividly forecasts the days when the Pacific shall tie another -Mediterranean — the mother ot a new ocean commonwealth —the richest 1 and greatest of them all. It is a stimulating article.

“The civilisation ol which wo arc the modern representatives began in the eastern basin of the Mediterranean Sea some six thousand years ago, ’ lie says. “It is the eldest culture in the world with a continuous record, lor' it is now accepted that the earliest history of China does not carry 11s back further than some lour thousand years, or that of India, perhaps three thousand two, hundred. Aet at least six thousand years ago there existed in the island of Crete and oil the shores of the Levant a nation of mariners, traders, and pirates with a civilisation as high as. if not higher than, that of contemporary Egypt or Asia. “The Cretans and the Phoenicians handed this culture to the Creeks. Under the Homans it filled the entire basin of the Mediterranean, and spread even to distant Britain. So it descended without serious break to our ancestors. Our f own civilisation is simply an expansion of that old culture to till the Atlantic. Through all its history it has been founded cm a sea, with the lands which lie round about it ; its characteristics have been endurance, energy, and power of expansion. India and China. “The principal civilisations outside Europe have been those of Egypt. Mesopotamia. China, and India: These were land civilisations founded on great navigable rivers such as the Nile. the Eiuphrates, and Tigris, or t-lie Ganges. Two still, remain, India and China ; the rest have disappeared. Such civilisations seem to. follow a regular development. They may rise to considerable heights of culture, but they tend to become conservative and stationary. “Their people do not travel and no not love foreigners. They rapidly at-j tain a stable Constitution; then, eon- j tented and stagnant, they may remain i at that stage for many centuries, as did j ancient Egypt- or China. This is a 1 condition repugnant .and foreign to our own restless race.

Only One Sea Culture. “Though there have been many such stationary civilisations and many attempts‘to found great land empires, vet there has never been hut the one sea culture, our own ; for tiny sea culture gains in strength licit, by isolation. but by its power of absorbing into itself every people with whom it comes in contact!" The ancient Cretans would indeed have been astonished had they been told that, six thousand years later, their cuitiwal descendants would live on j both sides of the Atlantic: yet such are we and we may Jeel con I blent that our culture will .not disappear, whoever may carry it on. Stationary Civilisation. “Of all the land civilisations only two survive—lndia and China. _ Me are] often warned of what dreadful things may hupi>en when these countries] ‘awaken’ and flood the world with their millions. Hut this is to, picture all

peoples as restless and as quarrelsome as ourselves. it may .be doubted whether the racial tendencies cultivated | by so mnnv centuries of stationary life can be quickly overcome and altered. Egypt never expanded iurth.er than Syria : the powers of Mesopotamia only reached the furthest stretch of the shore of the Mediterranean before they fell.: India lias been the helpless victim of one invader after another. The expansion which means life to our sea race seems dangerous to those otherwise stable land empires. They can 1 old ! together so long as they cling to their river valleys, for the difficulties of communication over the intervening mountain ridges prevent permanent expansion.

“But the result is that a valley nation is difficult to conquer, and fmds it difficult to conquer others. Eugi tnd would never have'conquered India bad that country not been very disorganised, and even then she did it from the sea. Napoleon failed to conquer the valley people of the Volga. Colonising tlie Seas. “But Europe steadily colonised the seas. She surrounded the Atlantic, then, crossing the American continent she came, in the sixteenth century, to the Pacific. At the same time that Balboa gazed, westward from Darien, a Portuguese squadron entered the Pacific at Malacca. So, in the first decades of the sixteenth century, Eurpoe penetrated to the two ends of the world. Being Europeans and seafarers t hey did what no one had done before — they j-4ned the two ends together; Magellan crossed from America to Asia in 1521. After all the centuries of Chinese civilisation it was a Portuguese sailor who first crossed the Chinese Ocean, and by so doing he established a European claim on tho ocean:

“The succeeding four centuries saw the rapid discovery and colonisation by Europe of the Pacific shores. First Spain and Portugal, then Spain alone, then Holland, England, and America have taken up this work, but the Pacific is not yet an enclosed sea. Problem of the Pacific. “For.the European colonists of the Pacific still look eastward or westward to America or Europe. They do not look towards the ocean itself. Up to the end of the nineteenth century the Pacific was not a unit, or the centre ofa civilisation, as was the Atlantic. “But, in the beginning of the twentieth century Japan asserted herself as a Pacific Power, and a new situation arose, in which the Pacific was to appear as a unit, the possible seat of a civilisation independent of Europe or of the Atlantic. This is the problem of the Pacific, and in considering the future of that ocean the questions before 11s arc. shortly: How long will it be before the Pacific is 110 longer a mere dependency on Europe or America, but the centre of a culture of her own? And what nation or race will dominate that culture ?

“The future will almost certainly see a Pacific commonwealth. Will it lie while o.r yellow or straw-enlourecl, or perhaps, piebald? “The Kuropean ‘white’ races, and particularly the ■Nordic’ race, have the strongest caste prejudices in the world. “The Mongols a!ro considered by ethnologists to be further removed from the ’-while man’ than any other race of men. between the two will certainly take place, dmt only very slowly. A straw-coloured civilisation is very many thousand years away, but it is not. impossible. The unifying tendencies of an ocean are very strong. “For a very long time to come yellow and white must divide the Pacific. “Who can venture to prophesy what may he the result when the deepest philosophies of F.nropc .and of the Orient mingle, as they may mingle, into one Pacific culture? The commonwealth of the Pacific will be the latest e,f the ocean commonwealths, and it may be the richest and greatest of them all.”