THE MEANING OF MUKDEN.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 8332, 2 June 1905, Page 1

THE MEANING OF MUKDEN.

...... - » A MENACE TO AUSTRALIA * AND NEW ZEALAND. ■ ■> ' • . (By "HUBERT," in the Manchester "Sunday Chronicle.") i ■•'•'■ One fact about ourselves and our irinfls of which ' the present war has made us actually conscious is that, in spite of telegraphy, wireless and other, distance does still count for a good deal with us. We may talk as we will about electricity having " annihilated space and time," but in point of fact, though time has been rather badly damaged by scientific discoveries, space still remains a potent factor in our way of looking at events. There can be no doubt at all, I think, that we have none of us taken the immediate and lively interest in the struggle that has been going on in Manchuria that its real importance and its very possible j consequences deserve. We have been told, until we are a trifle tired of hearing it, that the battle of Mukden was the greatest battle that has ever been fought in the world, and we accept the statement. But do we realise it exactly ?. Realise it, I mean, as we realised the significance of Sedan and the siege of Paris, or of Plevna and the approach of the Russian armies to Constantinople? We do not. We have taken this desperate conflict very casually. j doubt whether the telegrams from the seat, of war have always been the first items of news we have glanced at in ■ our morning papers. And the reason, w_ must presume, is that it has all happened " such a long way off." . The idea of this article is to suggest that in slighting, as it were, in our minds the Russo-Japanese War and the results of it up to date we have been wrong; we have been doing our intelligence less than justice; we h&ve been making a great, if a natural and an unavoidable, error of judgment. Let us try to focus the actualities a 'bit; then we shall get a clearer and A BETTER DEFINED VIEW OF THE POTENTIALITIES. '•:.' In the battle of Liadyang the Russian Army was defeated; in the battle ot Mukden it has been smashed. It ' has been oiit-numbered, out-generalled, "out-inarched, out-fought. The Russian : war-organism has been destroyed. It is not so much that a Japanese force has beaten a Russian force;, it is that Japan has beaten Russia. For the future it is no more a question of -the predominance in the Far East, or of the command of the Pacific. In the Far East Japan is predominant. Japan commands the Pacific. . Let us look now at some of the ways in which this accomplished fact may affect Europe, may more particularly .' and specially affect us. The portions of our Empire most directly, most vitally, concerned are our Australasian colonies. Just take down the map and you will see that is so. We have heard a good deal in the past from Australia and New Zealand about possible " separation." When the Australian or- the New Zealander over here gets a little bit exalted with wine or rhetoric he is apt to indulge in what is known in his own country as "colonial blow.; to swagger a bit; even to threaten. He lets drop hints of ■ what he loves to call "cutting the painter." He is inflated with the • prospect of an independent future; and if the mood lasts until he gets home he writes in the same vein to / the 'Sydney " Bulletin." It is not < conscious humbug on his part ; he really means it all. He honestly believes that the connection between England and her Australasian colonies is a."sentimental " one from their point of view, whatever it may be from ours. He loves the Old Country very much as a robust. and affectionate young man may love bis-aged grandmother. He will be quite nice to his granny, but if granny attempt to interfere with, to dictate to him, to rein him with her apron string, well, that apron string, otherwise " the painter," will be summarily snipped . . with the wool shears presumably. Mukden h_s put an end to all that. For the first time in their history Australia and New Zealand, have as a — relatively — near neighbour, a Great Power, and a Great Power moreover alien from them in race, in psychological sympathy (I don't like that phrase, but it exactly expresses what I mean), In religion, and in political aspirations. .For let it be borne in mind that although Japan is a civilised nation, her • civilisation^ except in mere externals . , (machine guns, telegraphs, telephones, trams, etc.) is not, and never can be, such as ours. So pur colonial brothers have lost that immunity from outside peril upon which so far they have very naturally and very properly plumed themselves. .THAT IMMUNITY VANISHED THE OTHER DAY, when Kuropatkin turned his horse's head and rode away North from the stricken field of Mukden. For the first tun. Australia and New Zealand have as neighbour a Sea -Power. No one who has read, as we most of us have by this time, books about Japan, and who has studied its " geographical conformation in an atlas, can have any doubt that a Japanese * navy will in the near future be an even greater factor in the world's destiny than the Japanese Army is to-day. Japan is, if I may so put it, "cut out " for a Sen Power. She is_ a populous island with a long coast line, a coast line with any number of harbours and inlets. She is more like England in this respect than any other country in the world. So far she has been compelled to build her navy in England; but that compulsion is transient only. • In a very, few years she will have shiftV.

yards and ship artificers of her own. Already she has learned the vital importance of a navy to a world-power. They quite understand in Tokio what the command of the sea has meant to Oyama. There they know, even better than we do that Mukden was won by Togo's battleships; that Kuropatkin is being torpedoed out of Manchuria. Now this war is being waged because the Japanese women keep on having babies. That is a crude way of putting v., but it is exact. The baby-bearing capacity of the Japanese women is the cause of the war, whatever may be its pretexts. The islands of Japan are ' not big enough to hold the Japanese people, and they must go somewhere. Just at present they will go to Korea, but there are pleasanter places in the world than Korea, and two of those places are New Zealand and Australia. THE JAPANESE HAVE TURNED LONGING EYES TO AUSTRALIA for some time past, but Australia, fearing the "Yellow Peril," and desiring intensely that the - country should remain an " all white " land, has consistently and ' almost insultingly warned the yellow, men off. Secure behind the British fleet she has been able to enforce her objections. But how if the painter were cut and the British fleet had business elsewhere P. How if, instead of an English admiral and his ships, Togo and his fleet were some fine morning to appear in Sydney Harbour with a polite request for the free and unrestricted immigration of the ' subjects of his Majesty the : Mikado? Could, with a cut painter, such a polite request be refused? < Well, no, as a matter .of cold- fact it couldn't; and every intelligent Australian "* and New Zealander will recognise this; and that is why we shall have rather less " co-loni-I blow " in the future than we have had in the past. Whether in any case, painter or no •oainter, British fleet or no British fleet, British Australasia will be suffered very long to remain a white man's land, is a question which may well give rise to something more than mere platonic speculation. Japan is a Great Power> and as a Great Power she will have to be treated. One does not, after Mukden, quite see with what face ,we shall be able to tell her that her emigrants shall not be permitted to soil . Australian territory with their yellow toes. The diplomatic difficulty is enhanced, the racial problem rendered more puzzling by the fact that, thanks to the objection of Australia and New Zealand women to have children, the two colonies are to all intents and purposes undeveloped lands, and lands which show no immediate signs |of rapid • development. If one thing is more certain than another it is that no people will for ever be permitted to run a ; ring fence round unoccupied and undeveloped territory. The world is too crowded, Asia is much too crowded \ for dogs in the manger to ha^e it all their own way. The command, to be fruitful and multiply is as imperative as ever it was. The modern version of it would seem to run, BE FRUITFUL AND MULTIPLY, OR LOSE YOUR INHERITANCE. Mukden must needs have other, even more far-reaching, if more subtle and less obvious -consequences. Even 'before victoryVhad crowned her arms, the influence of Japan was making itself felt in Europe. It had invaded, I might almost _ay it had transformed, our art. It is long ago since the Japanese fan found its way to the British back parlour, and Japanese embroideries decorated the shoulders of British matron and maid. That was but a phase, of course, and one needs not to make too much of it. But go into the Whistler Exhibition in London to-day, and you will be blind indeed if you do not see the artistic genius of Japan peeping at you from all its walls. After Whistler, the late Aubrey Beardsley ! was the most vital and original of the draughtsman-artists of our generation. It was well said of him that he influenced men whose artistic reputations were made when he was in his pradle. And the work of Beardeley was saturated with the .pint of Japan. How long will it be before Japanese literature follows in the wake of Japanese art? That is a question which neither you nor I can answer, of course, but inasmuch as we have our wits about ; us, we know quite well that come it will, and that by the very nature of it as literature, it will sway us more potently than decoratrve art oould ever do. The art of a people is, to put it roughly, the expression of that people's emotion; its lit- i er vture is the expression of its thought. In a nations literature you come face < to face with a nations innermost mind, and it is 'absolutely impossible, even for i the dullest, to come into contact with . a mind and to remain untouched for j good or evil or for both. From looking j at a picture you come away with more , feelings than ideas, from the reading of a book you come away with more idea, than feelings. The expansion of Japan will make it as impossible for us to exclude her ideas from our minds as it will be IMPOSSIBLE TO EXCLUDE HER ( SHIPS FROM OUR HARBOURS* Let us remember that Japan, like all ' Oriental countries, has a great and \ voluminous literature—^he whole East, j in fact, is a vast library stuffed with manuscript — that this literature en- • shrines ideas, philosophies, widely dif- ' fering from ours; that presently this , literature .will be opened up to us, and 1 these ideas and philosophies become, as it were, part of the very furniture of J our minds. Who will dare venture to set limits . to the influence of thought : and 'methods upon our sociological development? : j This is manifestly too big a matter to be handled at the end of < an -article. , Let me content myself, ] then, with presenting one aspect of it 1 to your consideration. Hitherto it has . been almost a commonplace of sociolo- < gists that the position of its women was the criterion of a people's civilisa- \ tion. And, truly, there would have ] seemed to be some historic grounds for the contention. It is an indubitable \ fact that the most progressive nations < "*T*"**T~* MM "~~""" M "*""™ M "T*"~^ i

have been those in which women enjoyed, or, not to beg the question, let us say possessed, -the greatest amount ot freedom, social, economic, and political. The most retrogressive or stagnant peoples have been those in which the functions of women were more or less confined to child-bearing and childrearing; in which woman was seen but not heard, and not so very often seen. Ask any American to-day in what respect he considers "these States" to be furthest anead of poor mildewing, out-of-date old Europe, and he will answer y<pu with pride, in the the position occupied by its-wonien-i ••••■ * „ Well, now, here in Japan we have a people which in one generation haa leaped into the very front rank of civilisation and elbowed its way a little bit further even than that. Here is a people great in war, great in art, rapidly becoming great in industry, and greater still in that perfection of social organisation without which everything else counts as naught. The social mechanism of Japan is, after all, but THE OUTWARD EXPRESSION OF ITS INWARD, INVISIBLE SOUL. Yet in adopting so "much else that is Western there are two sides of its life that the Japanese people has steadfastly declined to Occidental.-- —its religion and its attitude towards its women. The Japanese »vonian, we are assured, is athletic and educated, but the Japanese woman is suffered to play no active part in tbe affairs of exterior life. Her place is her home, her duty i_ her children, she is still " subject unto her husband," to use the phrase so unpopular in advanced feminine circles over here and across the Atlantic. She is neither economically, nor politically, nor socially "free."- Nathless she has bred the men who fought at Mukden, who have made Japan a Great Power. And then there is the Geisha I But I don't want to say anything about her just now. The Geisha can wait. Here, then, is a smashing blow to our feminist theories! What becomes of our criterion of civilisation? It looks almost as though that, too, had been blown to bits by Oyama's guns at Mukden.