MIXTURE OF RACES

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 19994, 10 November 1927, Page 3

MIXTURE OF RACES

“NOT VERY DREADFUL" A PROFESSOR’S OPINION. SYDNEY, Nov. L One of the most horrible sentences ever penned, in Professor Griffith-Tay-lor’s opinion, is that of Kipling’s: “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet-” In a lecture on “Problems of the Far East,” given in Sydney to-day, Professor Gri-ffith-Taylor, with the help of lantern slides, gave a rapid ethnological survey of the colouraJ; races bordering the Pacific., and indicated their domestic and international problems. The root of all the problems, the lecturer said, was the need for elbow room. There were 800,000,000 human beings on the earth in 1800, and 100 years later that figure had doubled. One-ninth of the world’s population was coloured and was governed by coloured; people, one-third was composed of white races who governed themselves, and the remaining five-ninths consisted of coloured races living under the rule of white peoples. Friction and a large measure of discontent were the inevitable result.

The consequences of a mixture of races were not as dreadful, the lecturer supposed. There was an extraordinary mixture at Hawaii, and yet the people there in pretty as much harmony as people lived elsewhere. Some remarkable ethnological truths were being learned by a study of the people of Hawaii, not the least important being the fact that the half-caste Hawaiian and Chinese were superior, intellectually and socially, to either parent. He had seen in a Hawaiian school a girl whose blood was a mixture of Hawaiian, Chinese, German, Norwegian and Irish inheritances. Yet, judged by European standards, the girl was of quite average type, morally, socially, and intellectually. Racial problems of the Pacific, Professor Griffith-Taylor declared, should not be left to untrained minds of alarmist tendencies, but should be deart with by trained ethnologists, who were capable of unbiased judgments and able to sift the truth. The problems were of vital importance to Australia, for they lay at her doors, he said. He showed- a slide illustrating the distribution of population in Eastern Asia, and indicating a small proportion in the regions having a low rainfall. 4 4 lf the Chinese can’t populate, such a region,” he remarked. “I don’t see how Australians are going to populate similar regions in this country.