WORLD DEVELOPMENT.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXIX, Issue 1766, 18 December 1917, Page 1

WORLD DEVELOPMENT.

A PREDICTION BY SIR ERNEST SHACKLETON. Sir Ernest Shackletpn, the famous explorer, in the course of an anterview by an American pressman, -spoke of after-the-war possibilities. He said: “Anion" the things I see, not very distant, is one which to the unravelled resident of this side of the world will seem' a matter pitifully small in these great days of cataclysms, but which the people of the United States more truly will appraise—the regeneration of Mexico by act of God the richest nation in the world, inhabited by the descendants of a race who performed marvels before the English or Americans, the French, the Germans,"or the Russians really had emerged from barbarism, even before the Greeks and Romans had built their splendid civilisation, and now, by act of stupid man, one of the sorriest spots upon the footstool. I see a Belgium, not only sure of champions, but freed from threat by an aggressive, greedy neighbour. 1 sec a revived Servia, recovering in a Balkans freed from war’s alarms. “All evidence is favourable to the promise of a now world after the war ends.” I interrupted the great student of waste places (writes the interviewer). Here was he, who, through his own efforts, had made many of the unknown portions of the world familiar to mankind. I had supposed that most of them at least were mapped and ready for the hardy settler who cared to venture thither, yet he spoke as if this were not so. Tasked him about this. - He smiled. “The thoughtless may believe the world to have been entirely explored,” said he, “that there is nothing more to find. Perhaps I have earned the right to speak in contravention of such error, because for fifteen years I, myself, have searched these ‘stark and sullen solitudes that sentinel the pole.’ WHAT THE FUTURE OFFERS TO MANKIND. “Let me briefly summarise what; actually are facts. “It has been calculated that the normally habitable portion of the world will be filled within about 200 years, and this calculation has throw some thinkers into silly panic. When it was made, the work- of one individual American was not taken into consideration. This American —I speak of him with that true reverence which must animate till scientists at thought of his achievements —is General Gorgas. “One of the worst death-traps on the surface of the globe, the Panama, was conquered through the triumph of this genius over the mosquito. ‘To-day the Panama Canal Zone is as healthy as London or New York. “This multiplies by many fold the area of those now unoccupied and erstwhile forbidding sections of the earth which we may regard as available for future human habitation. Tens of thousands of square miles which in the past have been closed by so-called ‘miasmatic” fevers to the foot of man now have been rendered conquerable. • POSSIBILITIES OF RUSSIA BEYOND BELIEF. “The possibilities of Rqssia are beyond belief. Much of the richest sort of temperate-zone land is in the Russian domain, and most of it is undeveloped. “Siberia and South America, especially offer immense and easily available waterways calculated to greatly lighten their development. “In those regions of the earth’ in which my trend toward polar exploration especially has interested me I must admit that I see no eeor nomical advantage likely to arise from settlement, even if enough men could be found who would endure the hardship;- these ice-bound lands are not cultivatable, and if they hold mineral wealth it must remain where it is now till new methods of removal are devised. “Nevertheless, exploration of them will have a vast, if indirectly productive, significance, for a full knowledge of the Antarctic is of supreme importance to agriculture in South America, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa, The Antarctic continent is the breeding place for all the winds which blow across those fertile lands and for all the rains which fall upon them.”