World Policy in the Pacific.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLV, Issue 4, 27 July 1910, Page 6

World Policy in the Pacific.

TRUE CENTRE OF INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY. EXPERT S PLAIN TALK. LONDON, June 17. Dr. T. Miller Maguire, the well-known authority on strategy, has kindly furnished me with a copy of an interesting paper which he has written on “The New Pacific.” He regards the Pacific as the true centre of the world’s strategic gravity. “There have been Press and Imperial Conferences lately,” says this outspoken critic, “which have been the very acme of absurdity. As an eloquent Canadian said, they were mountains of labour, and only brought forth mice. Indeed the Bluebook reporting the proceedings of the Imperial Conference is a ’masterpiece of the inane, and its authors seem utterly unaware of the present state of international strategy. They assume that it is quite impossible that Japan or America should ever be against us. They ignore the future of China.' “Look at the map of the Empire. The wiseacres in London discussed strategy without reflecting that, even as after the discovery of America, the centre of world policy .shifted from the Mediter-

ranean to the Atlantic, so since 1899 the centre of world policy has shifted from the Atlantic to the Pacific. The Imperial and Press Conferences ignore the importance of India, which has hitherto been regarded as the aim of every great Conqueror from Alexander to Tamerlane, and from Vasco de Gama to Napolean and Skobeloff. See the relation of India, Ceylon, Singapore and Hong Kong to that great ocean, ‘whose shores are fringed with gold,’ as Alexander the Great told his soldiers. . . . “I am glad to see tliat Australian and Canadian statesmen are only too anxious to adopt universal military service, to get up navies, to put an end to gambling, and secure generations of ■healthy and high-spirited mothers fit to give birth to’men and rear warriors. . . 1 fear that our recent indifference to the West Indies and the Mediterranean and the Pacific has diminished our prestige and enhanced that of Japan and the ■United States. It is very well indeed -that Australia ami Canada, therefore, are ready to take a large share in the defence of the Pacific, and are not under the influence of antimilitarist cant, and are enamoured of obligatory universal service, the only military system that ever yet enabled any country to acquit itself well in any serious international crisis.

‘■Germany,” says Dr. Maguire, “is not everything, and the preposterous policy of virtually withdrawing our fleets with modern armaments from the Pacific (to confront Germany instead) amazed the merchants of all other lands.”

After pointing out that China has begun to admire skill in arms, wants a modern fleet, and means to arm on modern lines in order to assert its sovereign rights in the face of the world, Dr. Maguire continues: —

“Now, it is not to be supposed for a moment that Chinese or any other coloured races will stand the stigma put upon them by South Africans, Americans, iand Australasians one moment more than is necessary. Hence I cannot see how their enforced isolation can be maintained, except at the cost of a series of wars. Their question is why the white race want supremacy. How is it to be maintained? The answer is, ‘Ry force.’ But suppose the coloured or yellow races organise and mobilise superior force, then the supremacy of the Anglo-

Saxons will be, challenged, and perchance lost from Hong Kong to Auckland and Panama, and from the Cape of Good Hope to the Gulf of Carpentaria.”

Whether our race will be able to hold its own depends largely, he adds, oil the extent to which we are prepared in advance of the dread contingency of war.

With al\ the fervour of a true Celt, Dr. Maguire describes the people of the ■United Kingdom as “our misled people—torpid with wealth, violent with ignorance, besotted with the worship of games, despising the cult of brain-power, and learning, and science.”