A MODERN TRAGEDY

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 56, Issue 4016, 23 February 1938, Page 10

A MODERN TRAGEDY

WHERE WESTERN CIVILISATION FAILED. The tragedy is this, that all that the West was bringing that might have been of inestimable benefit to China, in educational work, in the work of the Christian missionaries from America and elsewhere, and the industrial technique and equipment which would in time have enabled China to raise her standard of living —all that is likely to be lost, said Sir Arthur Salter, M.P., in the House of Commons. What will be left will be the worst of what the West has brought, made worse still by its transmission through this recently westernised Oriental country, Japan. If Japan succeeds in her present attempt at domination, it will be true of the pioneers of our own race and other Western races who brought the West to the East: The evil that men do lives after them; ' The good is oft. interred with their bones. Instead of the new Chinese State which was being rebuilt, there will, if Japan is successful, be an alien domination; instead of the rebuilding of the economic system of China on the promising basis that had been established in the previous few years, we shall have a harsh economic exploitation; instead of the civilising work of educational establishments and of missionaries, we shall have, as we have seen in the parts of China which have been previously occupied by Japan, a deliberate extension of debauchery by the opium traffic.