The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 1911. "CEMENT OF EMPIRE."

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 280, 19 April 1911, Page 4

The Daily News. WEDNESDAY, APRIL 19, 1911. "CEMENT OF EMPIRE."

Mr. H. G. Wells has been described as "the most considerable force in English literature to-day," and, this being admitted, the reason of it seems to be that he gets down to causes. In a recent remarkable article in Everybody's Weekly, which he calls "Cement of Empire," he asks himself, How shall our Empire be kept together? He cannot understand how v the Empire can be uni. fled and kept so by a "network of fiscal manipulation." He shows that the relation of buyer and seller is ticklish, that no one becomes fond of his butcher or baker, and that special orders to deal with one grocer or one plumber would not greatly endear relationship. "Forced buying is irritating buying," he exclaims warmly. He declares that while the British nation has for a hundred years been fed on platitudes and vanities, Germany has had the humility to develop a splendid system of national education, to toil at science and art and literature, to master better British methods of business and industry, and to clamber above Britain in the scale of civilisation. The great literary analyst emphasises the point that the Empire has been made by irregular means, by adventurers, traders, pioneer.?, explorers, unauthorised seamen, "eccentrics like Gordon and invalids like Rhodes." The rulers of the. Empire did not plan it. It happened in spite of them. "The Empire," he says, "can hold out no hopes of collective conquests and triumphs—its utmost military Tole must be the guaranteeing of a common inaggressive security; but it can. and if it is to survive, it must, give all its constituent parts such a civilisation as none of them could achieve alone, a civilisation, a wealth and fulness of life increasing and developing with the years. Through that, and that alone, can it be made worth having and worth .serving." He argues that the English language must be used throughout the Empire, not in destruction of the hundred and one languages belonging to the folk of the Empire, but as a means whereby every receptive mind may find a true medium by which it may broaden its horizon. "I mean specifically." says the teacher, "that our Empire has to become the medium of knowledge and thought to every intelligent person in it, or that it is bound to go to pieces. It has no economic, no military, no racial, no religious unity. Its only conceivable unity is a unity of language and purpose and outlook. If it is not held together by thought and spirit, it cannot be held together. No other cement exists that can bold it together indefinitely. To the lonely Youth upon the New Zealand sheep farm, to the young Hindu, thoughtful in some temple of Benares, to the trapper under a Labrador tilt, to the half-breed assistant at a Burmese oilwell, to the self-educating Scottish miner or the Egyptian clerk, the Empire and the English language should exist, visibly and certainly, as the media by which his spirit escapes from his immediate surroundings and all the urgencies of everyday, into a limitless fellowship of thought and beauty." Tt is shown that no adcnuate effort is being made to render th' English language universal throughout the Empire, but the writer indicates that organisation and understanding would ensure facilities for research that would have a unique consolidating influence. Mr. Wells alleges that the supposed rulers do not understand the Empire or how they came to be possessed

of it. He likens them to the tame rabbits that feed on fresh lettuces. The lettuces are available, but the rabbits.dpn'S know why, nor do they care. "New Zealand, for example," he says, "having spent half a century and more in sheepfarming, land legislation, suppressing its drink traffic, lowering its birth-rate, and, in short, the achievement of an ideal preventive materialism, is chiefly consumed by hate and fear of Japan, which in the same interval has made a stride from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, and which teems with art and life and enterprise and offspring." Mr. Wells asserts that the Empire must become the universal educator, book distributor, news agent, civiliser general, and vehicle of imaginative inspiration for all its peoples, "or else it must submit to the gravitation of its various parts to new and more invigorating associations." In short, the analyst shows that there is no sentiment in business and that forcible (unity without general understanding, general knowledge and true Imperial feeling, can never come about. "It matters nothing to the 'tame rabbits' that the whole next generation of Canadians has drawn its ideas mainly from American publications, that India and Egypt, in spite of sounder mental nourishment, have developed their own vernacular Press, that Australia and New Zealand even now gravitate to America for books and thought. It matters nothing to them that the poverty and insularity of our intellectual life has turned American art to France and Italy, and the American universities towards Germany* The slow starvation and decline of our philosophy and science, the decadence of British invention and enterprise, troubles them not at all, because they fail to connect it with the tangible facts of Empire. "The world cannot wait for the English.' And the sands of our Imperial opportunity twirl through the neck of the hour-glass."