THE EASTERN FACTOR.

Pukekohe & Waiuku Times, Volume 5, Issue 201, 18 August 1916, Page 1 (Supplement)

THE EASTERN FACTOR.

We are told unceasingly that the world is to be fashioned afresh after tho war. Wo are all to join together in creating a new heaven upon earth. There is one mighty factor which those agrecab'e speculations always fail to take into account. They forget the East. The vision unfolded liefore us suggests a great period of political and social reconstruction and of huge developments of manufactures and trade upon an organised basis v ith Germany left out in the cold. People talk as though the world consist*; of the United Kingdom, the self-governing Dominions, the rest of the Allies, and the United States, in the order named. Yet there are over nine hundred millions of people in Asia, and that is considerably more than half the population of the globe. With these words Mr. J. Lovat Fraser introduces an article the purpose of which is to warn us that we are not taking sufficiently into account the probablo effect of the war upon Asia; that in all our plans for the future wo must steadily reckon with the coming industrial development of Asia, and that Asia remains the seed-bed of political issues vaster than any now approaching a decision in Europe. Despite the tremendous events in which wo are now playing so great a part, Mr Fraser is inclined to believe that the dominating factor of the twentieth century will ultimately prove to be the renascence of Asia. In support cf this belief iie points to the fact that there have l>cen more astonishing changes of thought and life in the last twenty years in Asia than in all the Western world. While the West has unhappily lapsed into wholesale mutual slaughter, the dry bones of the East are quickening into new and vivid life. In this connection Mr Fraser says:— '"I like to count myse'f still reasonably young, but when I first saw China there was only one little piece of railway in the country, and that was far away in the north. Grave mandarins in pigtails and embroidered jackets tssured me that the Chinese would never tolerate railways. To-day the pigtails have vanished and the locomotive has triumphed. When I first saw India it was the backwater of the world. Nothing seemed to have happened there for forty years, and one thought the established order of things likely to be eternal. Yet I -have since seen India become a ferment of new ideas, and each time I have revisited the country it has seemed transformed afresh.' Mr Fraser asserts emphatically that he is not in tho least attempting to raise horrific spectres of a new Asiatic peril of a militant kind. He os satisfied that we need never expect to see a now Mongol horde marchin gon Moscow, or a new Suleiman battering at the gates of Vienna. The chief Asiatic peril is industrial. It may grow very slowly, but Mr Fraser is convinced that it must 'assuredly confront us in time. The substance of Mr Eraser's contention is that the industrial war which is expected to follow the war of guns is likely to be a much bigger and more arduous struggle than is yet foreseen, and that within ten years Asia may be playir.g a part in it, hardly yet realised. We shall probably enter it at a great disadvantage, by reason of the excessive and unwise inroads now being made by war taxation upon our capital. Mr Eraser says nothing about the difficult question of tariffs. All he suggests is that no discussion of postwar trade is adequate which ignores the existence of India, of China, and of Japan.