TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1915. THE WORLD'S UNSETTLEMENT.

Hawera & Normanby Star, Volume LXIX, Issue LXIX, 1 June 1915, Page 4

TUESDAY, JUNE 1, 1915. THE WORLD'S UNSETTLEMENT.

lhose whose memories go back to the seventies and who have formed the habit of, watching public events with close attention * will be aware (says- a writer in the Manchester Guardian) of a.",general contract between the earlier raiid'!%t^;^'ri-ignj.pf. ;^.l^eir: lives. The earlier part is a time of tranquil and hopeful outlook, the latter one of increasing apprehension, rapidity of change, and general unsettlement. The writer takes the Armenian 'massacres as - the dividing line, but unhesitatingly says that after that period there began a succession of events which in the internal development and the external relations of States provide a strong contrast with the relative calm of tae earlier years. He points out that close on the Armenian troubles followed the Turco-Greek war. Next year came the war concerning Cuba, and next year again began the three years' tragedy in South Africa. The year 1898 also saw us on the brink of war with France 'over the Fashoda affair, and J^e last three years of the century witnessed something of the nature of a general onslaught upon the defenceless bulk of China, culminating in the occupation of Pekin in 1900. By this time the Far East had definitely entered into European politics, and to the problems of the partition of Africa and the decay of Turkey, long the source of European unrest, was added the far greater question of the future of China and the relations of Europe to an Asiatic Power armed on the European model. The next act in- the development of the problem followed within little more than two years of the Peace of Vereeniging. Vast forces were engaged in Manchuria, and the world saw the first examples of the great siegebattles with whiph it has now become familiar. Then after the Russo-' Japanese war came the Russian revolution, followed for some years by political upheavals in many countries that seeemd to give promise of better things. Revolutions occurred in Turkey, Persia, and Portugal, and for a moment it seemed, as though the secular decay of the Near Eastern peoples was to be arrested by an internal movement of recuperation. But the humanitarianism of the Young Turk movement was a veneer, taken seriously only by a small minority of good but ineffective men. At bottom it was Chauvinist and despotic, and the methods of the new regime, fostered by the jealousies and selfishness of the European Powers, led straight to the Balkan wars. Meanwhile the whole European situation grew yearly darker, and on the question of Morocco, which had been the storm centre for seven years, the clouds came almost to bursting in 1911. In our domestic life at the same time the pace year by year became faster and more furious. Constitutional crises were solved, only to be followed by labor troubles of a magnitude quite unknown to earlier times, and these in turn yielded in excitement to threats of civil war. Thus (says the writer reflectively) the catastrophe of 1914 was not, for the observer of currents of public life, in any way a bolt from the blue. It was the climax of a time of stress and strain, the 4 final eruption of forces that had been shaking the world for two decades. For the last four years, in fact, since the Italians fired the first shot on the Tripolitan coast, there has been almost continuous warfare within the European system. So that it is not in reality one event that is now fatefully affecting the world, but the culmination of a world-sequence, of which the latest developments are not yet in sight, but which (as we must believe in the essential sanity and righteousness of mankind) will surely be in keeping with the world's .essential and enduring advantage.