The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, 1923. WAR AND COLOUR

New Zealand Times, Volume L, Issue 11423, 20 January 1923, Page 4

The New Zealand Times. SATURDAY, JANUARY 20, 1923. WAR AND COLOUR

Colour, according to sensation writers and grave Btudy calculators, is bound, sooner or later, to bring about a terrible conflict between the dark and white races for the mastery of the world. There may he, as a matter of fact there is, considerable racial antipathy in the world. The fact is notorious, and lest we forget, the sensational' writers keep the statements* by dark persons of this antipathy well to the front, with the plentiful addition of their own comments. Undoubtedly there is peril ahead; but is it as grave as these Simple Simons of sensation make it out to he? With them it is enough that some person has written a book on the subject. Is he a faddist, a Munchausen, a fool, a wise man? No question of that sort is allowed to perplex the sensation-monger. He has found a man bold enough to print a sensational thing in a hook. He knows nothing of the matter himself. Rut journalism, politics, and even literature, thrust men nowadays into positions for which they are, "beyond a certain glibness of generalisation, in no way fitted. They accept the first authority that comes; they allow his writings to inSame their own imagination; and then they proceed to inflame the imagination of the public. When Captain Bobadil, in the play, propounded his famous proposal to form a corps of expert fencers to destroy by successive challenge all the armies of mankind, there were not journalists to report him far and wide, and no magazines to carry his name to the list of the demigods who rule the affairs of men. Had the captain watted till our time for the propounding of his theory, he would have been acclaimed as a sage, wrapped in reams of. unquestioning, fervent adulation, and set up beside the King’s highway as a monitory authority to be very seriously reckoned with. The book, we noted the other day in this column, is far above the Bobadil level. But in one. respect it is absolutely of that level. It propounds a new theory, and that theory, which plainly points to the certain, and perhaps swift, ascendancy of the dark races over the white, is being accepted by an invertebrate public opinion as of real evangelistic value. A smart man once said of Mr Lloyd George: “I believe he ‘can’ read, but I am certain he never does.” It is early days to test the value of this statement by facts. But without straying from the general to the particular, it is possible to see that there is too much reading in to-day’s world. There is so much rubbish of romance, of history, of science, of gossip, and countless things, all printed and reviewed, erected solemnly into literature, passed down a thousand channels of magazines—the rampant successors of infallible churchmen. This prodigious quantity of rubbish is consecrated by the Prophets of Baal—the imperfectlyeducated journalists, the empirics of literature and'the professions, the wirepullers, the sellers of spurious wares and tellers of bad fables-—and so strong is the brand of approval imposed that one is inclined to respect the man who, like Mr Lloyd George in the above story, may be suspected of reading nothing at all. In the modem wilderness of letters there are so many wiseacres, and so many thoughtless disciples who worship wiseacres simply because they are wiseacres, that wandering about in that wilderness Is a very dangerous thing indeed. When the poet wrote his advice to “drink deep or tasie not the Pierian Spring,” he was warning men against the danger to themselves of empiricism. But to-day the empirics have destroyed themselves as men of sense, and are positively swarming over the field of letters, bent on destroying all good writing and sane thinking. Take this book about the colour danger. Whatever its author may say that is judicious or otherwise, the rapid readers, who dilute the Pierian Spring with the waters of thoughtlessness, have taken from the hook the fixed idea that the heterogeneous tribes of all the shades of colour darkness are able, willing, and ready to combine into one vast solidarity for the overwhelming of their enemy, the white man. The colour number dominates tEe white by two to one. "Why say more? The larger number is going to smash the lesser. Tile proportion is fatally mathematical. Nothing else counts. All these colours are going to join together, forgetting that Chinese and Japanese are like oil and water; that Koreans hate the Japanese as they hate the devil; that negroes know they are the victims of slave-raiding now, in spite of the vast efforts that the white man has made to save them, after he had abolished slavery in his own domain; that the touch of the white hand has hronght justice, and peace, and freedom to millions sunk under the tyrannies of dark colours. In spite of these facts blazing on the pages of history, and other facts of

merciless cruelty and fiendish destruction wrought by Black and yellow on black and yellow, these victims of too little learning, 100 much diluted knowledge, ask us to accept the statistics of number as proof that all these dark people are capable of joining in a great massed attack on the white peoples. And all because certain hotheads, whom they quote, have written fiery rubbish against their white masters. The absurdity is patent. There is discontent, and jealousy, and revenge, no doubt. But there are better qualities in favour of the white. In any case, there is no huge mass of bad feeling ready to rush the inferior numbers off the earth. What is more, there can never be, for the same reason that oil and water never combine. There is enough trouble in the world without worrying about the fantasies of wiseacres. Part of this trouble is the Moslem menace, to which we .referred. It is a serious menace, which has acquired great importance from the revival of Turkey. That revival is the consequence of a- lost opportunity, the opportunity afforded by the war of putting the Turk into his proper place. There is much reason for checking the Turkish aspirations, especially the aspiration to dominate the Black Sea -entrance. But the danger is not affected by the great colour question. Watch the Turk, the ambition of Russia, the revenge of Germany, and the weakness of the new States of Middle Europe., and keep all these in mind at Lausanne, with a strong determination to keep the Black Sea entrance open. This can be done without adding the colour bogey to the danger of the Moslem menace, which has much to do with the Moslem world, and beyond it, hut does not touch the colour problem. Every State in the British Empire, being vitally interested in the problems of Lausanne, should keep its mind clear by concentrating on realities.