PAINTING THE WORLD WHITE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVI, Issue 14133, 7 August 1909, Page 1 (Supplement)

PAINTING THE WORLD WHITE.

; "' «»■ "... .. bt TOHUNGA. i j i

To hear a number of people talk—from chief justices and professors to politicians and traders—one would imagine that this old world of ours un through space like a child s kail, painted round with stripes of red, white, black, brown, and yellow. Which would be humorous were it not that this pseudo-scientific delusion actually interferes with the making of railways in the North of Auckland and to the East Coast, and induces fanciful philosophers to doubt the expediency of letting the pakeha into the Native Lands lest the white man melts away under the heat of an Auckland summer. The dogmas of this Doctrine .of Colours are somewhat vague, but none the less emphatic, the vagary merely dodging the volleys of facts which would otherwise knock the Doctrine into the rings of Jupiter. For, unhappily for the theorists, the globe is not striped with the colour of its races, but patchedas anybody can see for himself who will spoil an old school atlas map by painting the lands of the world with the colours of their established populations. Theoretically the Maori may be a Jew or a Gentile, a stray from the Aryan or an offshoot from the Turanian, or one of the Lost Ten Tribes. But practically he is a brown man, a Polynesian, one of the great race which occupied the Pacific from Hawaii to Stewart Island, and flourished wherever food was sufficiently obtainablea not uncommon habit of animal life. This brown race does not stripe the globe, but patches. Its range extended from the northern sub-tropics to the southern sub-polar region, and it is at least as vigorous in temperate New Zealand as in sweltering Tonga. Yet our Little Whites imagine that the North European cannot compete and settle and survive, in spite of all the resources of his civilisation, as well as a brown people of the Stone Age. Whenever cheap labour is wanted in any new country we hear that the climate is unfit for white men, and that only Chinese will do. It is inferred that the Chinaman

is a child of the tropics, that he is inured

to warmish weather, and that- he can work in comfort where the European cannot work at all. Yet if we turn to the map we see that the range of the Chinese is not merely latitudinal but longitudinal, that he is to he found not only on the steaming coasts of tropical Asia, but in the freezing altitudes of Tibet and on the snow-covered plains of Manchuria. The Chinaman flourishes, as every other human being flourishes, wherever he can obtain food and cannot get somebody else to work for him. The Yellow- Patch on the map is anything but a stripe. In fact, there is no such thing as a latitudinal stripe known to ethnology. And the Yellow Patch, brethren, if we are to accept scientific evidence, was once far larger than it is now. It stretched from the Atlantic to the Pacific, all across the Northern World. - There may be more kinship than we wot of between Connemara and Canton. ■ And it is still to be found in detached blotches. " Scratch the Russian and you find the Tartar —who is Turanian which is the stock of the Chinese. And if you skim the cream of a superimposed Christianity from the teachings of Tolstoi you find beneath the placid philosophy of the born Confucian.

; Only in one part of the world have geographical conditions given to a single race [ ample opportunity of expression from Pole to Pole—and in that part unity of race was found within . historical times. From Hudsong' Bay to the Straits of Magellan, throughout , the Americas, the Red Man was master, and we can see that he .had driven before him some pre-historic races who still survive, as the Terre del Fuegans and the Eskimo, and *in odd -isolated lairs. The Red Man jjave us maize, tobacco, potatoes, chocolate, quinine, and other invaluable possessions. He was a steady agriculturist, and splendid hunter, a builder of civilisa-tions—-and the finest fighter history has seen, for he fought us in North America for centuries, and never ceased to fight until he was practically exterminated. This Red Man built .his towns by the Great Lakes of the North and by the Silver River of the South. He roaded the Andes and mined in Mexico, and trapped the beaver in Massachusetts. This Red Mark is long-drawn out, and it runs through every zone and every climatejust as one would expect. The Black Man can live as far south as the oceans will let him move, and as far north as he can travel. Stray negroes often die in cold* climates because of their ignorance of what to do, and also because they may not have been previously " selected " to withstand certain local influences. But they flourish in the Virginias, where there is plenty of snow, and are supposed to be the one thing needful to the Great Plateau of South Africa, where there are frosts which surprised the New Zealand contingents. And though they live most freely within the tropics" they evidently only do so because they can live there most easily of anywhere, and because they have never evolved the aspirations and ambitions which make every decent man of the higher races unhappy under merely animal conditions.

If no other race existed to oppose them, and if the oceans were bridged for them, we know very well that the world would ultimately be populated everywhere by negroes. The negroes of the colder climates would become the more vigorous, not because the cold climates of themselves favour health and strength more than the hot climates, but because the providing of the bare necessities of food, clothing, shelter, firing, makes men work in cold climates as they never have to work in warm. The Gospel of Work, preached by Mother Nature, with her whip of cold and hunger, confirmed by the gnawing hunger of the Great Desires, ariu' rewarded by the passionate love, which is gratitude, of Woman for the Man who fed and warmed and clothed and sheltered and protected her and her children, has been the Salvation of Humanity, is still the hope and anchor of our White Race.

The White Man is the strongest, the bravest, the most patient, of all the races— if he can understand why. But he has the little knowledge which is a dangerous thing, and that imperils him. He is afraid to trust his instincts and he is not too sure of his reason —with the result that he is the most feminine of the races, at once the most desirable, and the most uncertain. He has the power to compel other races to do the hard physical work and the yearning to play the part of the noble director. He has' the instinct to keep his muscles strong and his nerves taut, and the feeling that the holding of the plough and the swinging of the hammer are fitting for his people. And when he takes possession of new lands he stands face to face with the temptation to avoid bard work in unpleasant weather and in any weather; and he turns to the suggestion that he cannot flourish outside certain latitudes with the relief of a teetotaller discovering an exhilirating " temperance" drink.

And this is certain — certain as that the sun will rise to-morrow, as that- the rain will fall in its season, and the trees leaf in the spring! Wherever we White Men go as a nation, wherever we work the land and dig the mine and build and toil, we shall paint the world white and live. We may give toll in the tropics to sunstroke and to heat apoplexy, we may see millions drop by the wayside because they cannot work under difficulties but have we not already given toll to the Sea and to the Ice King, and have we not thus made our own lands, which for months are snow-bound? And wherever we allow an inferior people to enter among us—whether we find them where we go or whether we import them as we import cattle and sheep dogsand keep them racially hard and muscular with labour, while we gradually become racially soft and flabby through lack of labour—there we shall fail to paint' the world white, even though it be in the great home-lands where we have flourished and grown strong for thousands of yeara,