THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERS CROSS. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1910. THE CONTINUITY OF EMPIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLVII, Issue 14299, 19 February 1910, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald. AND DAILY SOUTHERS CROSS. SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 1910. THE CONTINUITY OF EMPIRE.

In these days few people have sufficient leisure to devote much time to the study of ancient history, or the older civilisations which have preceded us—and yet there is much to be learnt , of the possibilities of the future by : examining some of the achievements of the past. It is not only possible, but highly probable, that the accumulated knowledge and civilisation of the world to-day is no higher, if as high, as it has been at various periods in the past, and even modern. empires : must take second 1 place to those which. known to have existed in ' remote ages; One has only to remember that Nineveh, ' the. ancient capital of Syria, which . was wholly destroyed , six hundred years before Christ, - and of which no b , vestige remains, had a population of

nearly three millions, and would, even in these days of large cities, have ranked as the third, if not the second, town in the world. Or recall that Alexandria, the pride of Egypt five centuries before Christ, and later the second city of the Eoman Empire, was the centre of learning i up to the seventh century, and pos- ! sessed the most famous library then

known in the world, a library of! 700,000 books, whose destruction | probably involved to us later ages an irreparable loss of acquired knowledge. And to go even further back, how can we moderns read without a thrill *oi the glories of Babylon, the empire of which the foundation is ascribed to a. date nearly three thousand years before Christ. In arts, in science, in military achievements, 'this vast empire was easily —and the City of Babylon itself became, during the reign of Semiramis, the world's wonder city. It was famous for its art treasures, for its own | glorious architectural beauty, and, | more still, for the wonderful hanging gardens, which were even in those days of world-wide fame. The city indeed was so vast and extended over such a large area that when it was captured in 438 B.C. it is said the inhabitants of the more distant suburbs did not even know of the fact until the following day. •

And if the glories of the Near East 1 have departed, what can one say to I the Far Eastl Of the early civilisation of the Chinese, who, amongst other things, gave us the mariner's compass, we know comparatively little; but we know enough to be j certain that a thousand or two years j ago they were far more advanced i than they are to-day. As a fact there did exist an extensive record, in writing, of ■; the early history of this nation, but on the ascent to the throne, some two hundred and fifty years before Christ, of the Emperor Chi-Hung-Ti, the founder of the Tsin dynasty, he caused all existing documents to be destroyed in order that he might pose to posterity as- the sole founder of the Empire. It was he, by the way, who caused the building or the great wall of China, a wall separating the Empire from Tartary. As for India, the country simply teems with evidences of the possession* of an ancient civilisation, which, in scientific and artistic knowledge at least, would have had nothing to learn from the modern world fact, it is doubtful whether in matters connected with the more abstruse knowledge the West can even to-day teach anything to the East. And yet what has become of all these glories of the past 1 ? What remains to-day even to point to the ruins of Babylon, of Nin*veh, of a score of other great, cities of olden times? Nothing —hot even a village! And it \is the same in Europe. The nations which were great a thousand years ago have ■.- disappeared Greeks, the Romans, the Moore are nothing but a name.- The Empire of Charlemagne comprised nearly one-third of Europe; indeed, he and the Pope Adrian I. practically governed all Europe—and this . was a thousand years ago, when England was .still a conglomeration of petty kingdoms. When we see new empires coming up and hear their claims to a perpetuity, we can only remember that all the older empires did the same, and that they nevertheless all came to much the same end, and we must try and find a new way to avoid the sharing of their fate. Sometimes when a country seems to be most strong it is within measureable distance of its fall—Spain and Holland and Russia are only a few instances of this factand it therefore behoves us to take heed of what has been, and try and find the right way to go on growing bigger, lest we first stagnate, and then fall back. Let us hope that England, the mightiest of the modern Empires, may continue to progress and avoid, in the too easy resting upon old-time laurels, the pitfalls which have befallen her predecessors. , " _