PREPARING FOR THE STRUGGLE.

Te Aroha News, Volume VII, Issue 450, 1 March 1890, Page 8

PREPARING FOR THE STRUGGLE.

Onk of the most interesting and common senso speeches on the European situation was delivered recently at the Mansion House, London, by the Conservative lender, Lord Salisbury, He enunciated a view which lias already been given utterance to in these columns —that in the next great war national boundaries will be obliterated, and the vanquished Power or Powers may disappear from the map of Europe, He said : “ We live in a state of things to which there is no analogy. Mankind lias never seen such vast armaments as are now boing assembled together. Mankind has never seen suoh deadly weapons as the sinister ingenuity of science has now put into our hands, and we cannot prophesy what the result of the terrible accession to our powers of evil as well as of good will bring. Your Lordship, in your speech, indicated the danger that might come from the caprice or greed of any single power, At least let me offer you this countervailing thought. These tremendous aimaments, these terrible instruments of death, must mean to the eyes of nny statesman who contemplates the future, and has to decide the fearful issues of peace or war—they must mean that when once two nations are locked in the deadly grapple of modern war the end must be the destruction of one of them. The victor in such n struggle will be almost hound when lie is victor to take care that never again shall he, from the same quarter, be exposed to the same danger or subjected to the same evils ; and every statesman who is casting the horoscope of the future, and meditating on the consequence of his act, knows what a fearful stake it is he is now casting down upon the green cloth of destiny • , , The issue is so fearful that men will shrink from challenging it.” The sides have, however, already been taken, Russia and France on the one hand, Austria, Germany and Italy on the other. The struggle must come sooner or later, and if Lord Salisbury’s proplietio instincts are reliable, it will mean a material change in the status of Austria, Germany and Italy as nations, or the disappearance for many years of Russia and France as factors of importance in the world’s history. The statesment of these nntions thoroughly realise this, as does the English Premier, hence the holding back, and the manifest reluctance to put the very existence of their nationalities to the arbitrament of the sword,—Auckland Star.