NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLV, Issue 13708, 26 March 1908, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

ASIA CONTRA MUNDUMi

Tub Fortnightly Review print,, an .article, signed "Viator", entitled "Asia Contra Muiidlim." Tile writer says that Pearson's "National Lift: olid Character," which, when it appeared, was condemned as mere pessimism, is now proved to have been pure prophecy. His' theory as tr the inevitable fall arid decay of while civilisation .shook the self-confidence- of the while races, anil deprived them of thair absolute sense of assured superiority. As white self-con-BcitJtlSnesa was shaken, Asiatic self-con-sciousness came ink) being. The effect was like the first moment when the trainer's glance flinches befoie the eye of a tiger "Viator" then passes in review the various questions that Have been raised between Asiatics and Europeans in Africa, Australia, and America. lie says that the Japan* os? '"have done all of Which the authoi Of ' National Life and Character/ in his most daring. dreants, thought an Asiatic people capable. They have proved beyond all debate the immense potentialities of the Asiatic renaissance fat war, industry, colonisation, sea-power, aril thought. Yet they are still excluded from the fields of settlement into which are freely admitted the Jews, who are helots in the Russia Vanquished by Japan.' And they are excluded by the races who claim most vigorously the open door in the Far East.*' He reminds us of Mountstuart Elphiiistone's warning, that however profoundly the Indian races may be divided among each other, they might one day bo united by the sense of a common separation from ourselves. They must either have equality in the white sphere or monopoly in, their own. Already Asiatics number 800 millions of people, and as yet they havs been, organised purely upon an agricultural basis. " Let the sense of the common grievance rise steadily and dominate; let it be asserted that there shall bo white men's countries in evciy other continent, but that brown men and yellow men, no matter how much they increase or how far they progress, skill never have any countries but their own ; let the conception of Asia contra, mundum gradually arouse all its. races for a. colossal crusade; let Japan bo invoked by China as a leader, and by India, as a liberator ; and let the black races feel that the white man is like to be swept back at last; and then, indeed, the strangest dreams of the eclipse and extinction of western civilisation thigh'*, cotaa true."