EMPIRE AND RACE

New Zealand Mail, Issue 1716, 18 January 1905, Page 73 (Supplement)

EMPIRE AND RACE

(Erora Our Special Correspondent.) LONDON, November 25.

“The Development of the State,” upon which Mr George Wyndham, as Lord Hector of Glasgow' University, lectured tills week, is common ground of debate for Uo-th Englishman and colonist. What ought to- be that type of polity to which men should owe duties during their lives, and for which they must, if need be. lay down their lives? Mr Wyndham discussed the question in a speech of extraordinary wealth of allusiveness. He quoted or alluded to Aristotle, Cicero, Plutarch, Philo-, Judaeus, Diogenes Laertius, Lucian, Dante Rousseau, Virgil, Herbert Paul, Shakespeare, Froissart, Garrison, De Baif, Hobbes Tennyson, Montaigne, Darwin, Thomas Paine, Charlemagne, Joachim du Bellay, St. Paul, and Lord Acton —and probably others whose names I have overlooked. The ideal State, be urged, must have one grandens- of political design, illuminated by diverse glories of race achievement. Nationality should be revered within its proper limits, and every nation within the State should have character to redeem it from featureless cos in ospo-li - tanism. But he held that pride of race was a better incentive than pride of nationality. The several races or strains in a nation enriched it, and fortunately the nationalities included in the United Kingdom could lay claim to many such strains. Mr Wyndham warned his hearers against over-qstimating the creations of modern civilisation in the development of the State. “A life of polyglot restaurants and international sleeping-cars” did not conduce to civic virtue, but tended rather to “lap us in the listlessness of cosmopolitan luxury.” He repudiated sympathy with the clamour which would restrict a University curriculum to applied sciences and modern languages, and advised the students “not to abandon the heaped treasures of humanistic learning.” I fear the drift of Air Wyndham’fi discourse -was rather obscured at times by the glitter of his rhetoric. As one paper remarked next morning, a writer who laps us in “the listlessness of cosmopolitan luxury,” only to incite us into a choric pursuit of interpendent orbits, 5 who lures us into “the tangles of the Hercynian forest,” and then exhibits to our shuddering gaze a solar system drifting “inert through the night of space towards the dark resultant” of universal catastrophe, leaves us admirbut a little breathless. Nevertheless, Mr Wyndham made it clear that in his opinion “the two ideas of Empire and race” were not inconsistent, and that for the ideal State of the future both the “intension” of race and the extension of Empire were necessary.