THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 1900.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XXXVII, Issue 11440, 2 August 1900, Page 4

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. THURSDAY, AUGUST 2, 1900.

Lord Wolseley tells us that " China possesses every requisite for overrunning the world. 1 ' One may expect the Commander-in-Chief of the British army to know something of the subject. Nor does he stand alone in his opinion. Laveleye, the Italian savant, predicted years ago that in another century the Americas would bo English-speaking, Europe Russian, and Asia Chinese. General Gordon, whose knowledge of the alien races was inferior to that of no man in his time, always maintained that the Chinese had superior though latent military capacity. Mr. Pearson, once Minister for Education in Victoria, seven years ago asserted that the southward movement of the Chinese, until the whole of Malaysia was occupied by them, was "tolerably certain;" and their occupation of much more of Asia and the whole of South America not outside the range of probable happenings. These and a score of other similar opinions, held by men not given to wild flights of imagination, but impressed by their close observation of the yellow race, with an awed sense of its tremendous possibilities, to-day fascinate our attention. That living China, into which the greatest European army can only pierce lis a knife pierces a cheese, is so different a spectacle to the dead and disintegrated State which only waited for the divider, that it awakens in us uneasy thoughts of what may be the powers of this Frankenstein which we have stirred from sleep.

It has been our popular solace to persuade ourselves that civilisation could never again be destroyed by the barbarian because of the superiority of our civilised weapons. In this, when we come to think it over, there are so many false premises that we suddenly lose the comfort of assurance. In the first place, no civilisation was ever yet destroyed by savages, but always by some people termed "barbarian" by the civilised, because it did not possess the peculiar developments of art and science—usually of art— which had been produced in civilised cities. Nor has any civilisation been destroyed, within the clear ken of history, which would not have stood unshaken if it had retained to itself its Weapons. The case of Rome is one in point. Again and again, the matchless legions of tho Seven-hilled City beat back the assaults of our forefathers—who were not savages at all, but tribesmen and clansmen; who already possessed the special genius of our present civilisation ; who had the windmill and the water-wheel ; who could beat up against the wind before which tho Mediterranean sailors then drove helplessly ; who had already laid the foundations of our crowning glory of Letters, beside which Greek playwrights and Latin poets would be forgotten were it not for our reverence for age ; who had a morality that shamed tho Roman; who were loyal to the kingly blood but let no king make law as lie would. For centuries the legions held their frontier, and might be holding it still had they not sold their weapon to the Goth. For the weapon of Rome was not merely the famous Roman sword, which might be _ counterparted in any Gothic smithy ; it was the system of military organisation, tho perfected drill which ado the legionary a cog in the living machine, of which sword and pilum were but the point and edge. That weapon of perfect regimental organisation was as complex of its kind as any modern armamenture, was a thing of growth, a priceless military possession. Against it, Gothic skill and Gothic courage broke as iron breaks against steel. The legion shook the world with its ordered trampling, (lie mighty blow of its impact split and shattered barbarian hosts more effectively than lyddite, tho adamantine resistance of its shielded sides was as a Bulletswept glacis that could be carried where its captain willed. The Roman, boastful of his " Eternal City," unable to understand that there was potentiality greater than his own in the brain of the "barbarian" he despised, hired the Goth in time of peace to serve in the legions. In Roman service our forefathers learned the art of Roman war, got their hands upon the priceless weapon of military organisation and bore it back to their own people for the destroying of Rome, And we, in our turn, give our weapons and.

our skill and our military organisation to alien races, whom we have despised too much to few. Before the modern rifle, the Chinese bowman would be swept away, even as before the English archer the chivalry of France melted like snow before the sun. But Europe has armed the Chinaman, as it has armed the Russian—who is equally antagonistic to our civilisation—as it has armed the Jap, whose race can no more mix with ours than oil can mix with water. European brains have not only been given to the Turanian in the shape of the most modem arms and explosives and war mar chineries, but have drilled and disciplined him so that he can use them. We have empowered these Chinese hordes against us as Rome empowered the Goth who destroyed her. Were there no further factors in the problem, it would be altogether reasonable to think with Lord Wolseley that "China possesses every requisite for over-running the world !"

But there is an unknown quantity in the problem which is sufficient to alter all deductions, a quantity which was not in the Roman, The mechanical genius of the North European nations is the impelling force of our stupendous modern developments?; ours is the inventive brain, which applied to the industrial arts has transmogrified the earth as nothing ever did before, which concentrated upon the art of war would speedily produce defensive and destructive powers, as yet undreamed of. At the time of the Spanish-American war, Edison asserted that it was already within the power of electrical science to make the waters of any harbour absolutely unapproachable, that American workshops could so equip a handful of men as to enable them to annihilate every living thing that entered their lightning-defended zone. If China assumed that portentous attitude, which the prophets declare she may, and began with her countless hordes to drive in the frontiers of civilisation, nobody would dream of allowing her to be supplied with more weapons lo our hurt, New forces would appear in war. Without those forces, without renegade experts to train men in their use, without vast workshops continually kept at the highest point of equipment to repair and replace, China would speedily become as powerless as though her troops still used the bow and arrow. For in her own people is no great mechanical instinct. She has invented; hut all her inventions are crude and incomplete, hardly more than accidental discoveries. Gunpowder is a very simple combination, totally different, to the high explosives which result from complex and delicate processes. Her printing never advanced beyond the first act of impression. Her compass was a child-like application of an observed natural phenomenon. When we bethink us that our mechanical skill differentiates us completely from those brainy and artistic civilisations which grew up around the Mediterranean, and' in the great plains of the Euphrates and the Ganges, we may realise somewhat that though the Turanian may mimic us he cannot possibly compete against us. If the West is but loyal to itself, and does not aid the yellow race by further supplying it with our continually-improving weapons, we shall be even more impregnable than Rome would have been had she held in Roman hands the discipline that was the soul of her world-conquering legions.