THE CHANGING WORLD.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 6936, 27 October 1900, Page 2

THE CHANGING WORLD.

"Work for the Map-makers. {London Sim.) The men ■who make the maps of the nations are a great deal busier these days than are the men who make their laws. It is a little less than two years since those personages had to take Spain out of the New World, remove her from part of the oldest section of the Old World, and put the United States in her place. Two or three years bsfore that time some changes in the map of Asia had to be made as a consequence of tho war between China and Japan. Africa is furnishing some work for the map-makers at the present time, through the subversion of the little republics north and south of the Vaal Eiver. Perhaps China will contribute to their activity within a few months. Historians and chroniclers used to call 1848 TIIE YEAK OF WONDERS. The designation was appropriate. No period since the time when Bonaparte was marching across Europe and pulling down old monarchies and setting up new monarchies, republic?, or confederacies, saw more political upheav :h than occurred in that year. Every throne from the Seine to the Danube was shaken at" that time. The. throne on the Thames was at one time believed to bo in danger, for there was a rebellion in Ireland for awhile, and the Chartists threatened serious trouble in Ensland. Indeed, tlie throne on the Neva appeared to its occupant to be unsafe for a year or -two, for it was nob love for Francis Joseph which impelled the Czar Nicholas I. to send 100.000 soldiers over into Hungary to aid Francis in suppressing KofsuUi and Gorgey, but the knowledge that ths success of tjiri?e persons would bo a blow to the entire guild o.f kings. INTERNATIONAL BOUNDARY LINES. however, have been changed in Europe ail the rest of tho world in more places at more than one period since 1848 than they

were at that time. The metamorphoses in Central Europe which took place as the result of the war between Prussia and Austria in 1866, between Prussia and France in 1870, between Russia and Turkey in 1877, and in the Balkan region around some of these years, induced a dizziness in those who attempted to trace them minutely. Something of the same feeling will be excited among those- who try to follow 1 the changes of the past fifth of a century in Europe, Asia, Africa, and America. '" Remove the map," exclaimed Pitt when the news of Bonaparte's defeat of the coalition of Kings at Austorlitz reached him. "Every map of Europe drawn within the next ten years will be obsolete before the ink ig dry upon it." The world's map has been in almost as unstable a condition in the past few years, and is in that state still.