COMMERCIAL WAR

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIII, Issue 321, 7 June 1911, Page 7

COMMERCIAL WAR

WITH CHINA AND JAPAN. PROGRESS AND PROSPECT OF THE BELLOW RACES. Auckland, June 2. During the course of his speech sit the Auckland University College " capping ceremony," held in the Choral Hall this afternoon, the Chancellor, Sir Robert Stout, dealt interestingly with the struggle for superiority amongst the nations of the world to-day. They beheld hitherto neglected races organising, striving for knowledge and for industrial success. Of lute years the yellow race had come to the front. Fifty years ago who would have believed that Japan would become a world power? If they recalled the ambassadors that left the Kingdom of the Rising Sun and visited President Buchanan in Washington in 1860, and thought of the Japanese nation now, they might well say that it was one of the marvels of the last and present centuries. The yellow race was a strong one. It was strong in brain power; it was strong physically; and its civilisation had forced it to study industry and peace. It had had many drawbacks, but Western enlightenment was now penetrating even China, and the Chinese had engagod passionately in the quest for knowledge. Who could foretell what the next fifty years would show? In his opinion the Chinese had mora brain power than the Japanese, and, judging by what he had read recently of the doings in China, they were now beginning to organise and educate their people. It was not, in his opinion, so much a war with China and Japan that was to be feared—not a military engagement, but industrial competition. Japan was becoming the seat of great manufactures, and China might become the same. Nation was competing with nation in Europe, in industrial enterprise, and were our people to be deemed to be mere hewers of wood, drawers of water, producers of wool and of mutton V Were the higher branches of industrial enterprise to be closed to our youths? He hoped not, but we would fail unless our youth was educated and kept physically fit.