MUST ARMAGEDDON COME?

Northern Advocate, 19 December 1910, Page 3

MUST ARMAGEDDON COME?

OUR CHANCES IF IT DOES.

A peep into the future was essayed and a warning sounded by Professor J. MacMillan Brown in the course of his address at the Technical College prize-giving ceremony in Christchurch. There were changes coming over the industrial world, he said — changes that would tell greatly upon the future of this country. The industries of the world were getting into the hands of those nations possessing the greatest war departments. At the present time New Zealand was as far from the centres of commerce as any country (excepting the Antarctic) could be, but the Pacific Ocean was going to be the centre of enterprise and struggle. Of this the nations of Europe had become conscious , and they had been trying to secure front sections on its land surfaces.

Within a generation this Dominion would witness great happenings, and would become involved in world-wide movements, and then it would be that her marvellous possibilities and potentialities would be realised. The South Island, continued the professor, possessed a great water-front and lofty mountains that would develop a moun tainous and maritime people of the type that had never been defeated in war. This country, instead of being the tail, would become the shield of the British Empire when there was waged the final struggle in human history—the Armageddon from which would be evolved the federation of mankind and the consummation of peace. Those who wanted peace at once had had their common sense obscured by their great ideals. There was going to be a great struggle—undoubtedly a struggle that was not very far off. "If the British Empire, and we as a part of that Empire" continued the professor, "are not prepared for that struggle, we shall be trampled under foot by an autocracy—the greatest disaster that could befall mankind, for the British Empire is the guardian of human liberty." In conclusion, Professor Brown declared that the statement that Britain was losing her commercial position was a German "manufacture." Let them turn back the pages of history to the end of the nineteenth centuries, and they would find at that time a belief in the decadence of Britain. Yet the decadent Britain had built up a commerce and an Empire such as the world had never seen before. He had very few doubts about the struggle that was before them, for history hae" not a single instance to show

them of an island nation that had retained its virility having been defeated upon the sea by a continental nation.