CURRENT TOPICES.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LIV, Issue 186, 5 February 1912, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICES.

' RIVAL COLONISERS. We accept.as a reason for the aggression of Germany ..her very natural desire for new territory for her crowded millions. We also pride ourselves with justification on the fact -that Germany is not so successful a coloniser as Britain, that thousands of her people lire und«r the British flag and make.gopd British colonists, and that her methods in her colonies are too bureaucratic and military to he popular or to attract settlement. The German himself is beginning-to believe that he is really a coloniser, and lately Dr. von Dernberg, who used to be Secretary of State in the Reichstag, emphatically declared that German colonisation was already a success. The learned German gave no reasons for his belief, but he intimated that Germany was likely to get very busy in the newly-acquired Congo territory, and probably had good reasons for saying that a railway policy would be pushed on with at once. Germany is not even now quite aware of the "definite boundaries of the newly-acquired territory, and there is a certain bitterness between the French State servants who still perform much of the administrative work and the German military officials who are flourishing the sabre. The Congo country is capable of immense development, but, as this German doctor has said, the French have allowed things to drift. The French, to be franfc, a ? e just as unsuccessful as the Germans as colonisers and colonists, although they too, under the British flag are immensely useful colonists. In German occupation of the Congo territory, however, there is hope that the many diseases, including the dread "sleeping sickness," will be fought and killed, for already German science has discovered that these diseases can be eradicated. Indeed, to make many parts of Africa safe for the white man and less deadly to the natives science will play a greater part than agriculture, and it is peculiarly true of medical scientists that they are less jealous and self-advertising than any other class of man. The fighting of the sleeping sickness is heing undertaken by scientists of many nationalities, urged on without any doubt by a real love for humanity and without hope of any personal reward. German activity in Africa apart from actual colonisation, is likely to result in many blessings to mankind.

INDIA'S NEW CAPITAL The story of Delhi, its kings, its peoples and its priests -has been handed down m many ways: By the droning chant of generations of illiterate poets and minstrels; by the reed pen in the hand of a chain of unknown scribes throughout those ages we call the Dark, only because they are dark to us; by the chisel and hammer of the Asokan engraver Jn stone at Meerut. and' of his brother in iron at Lalkot; by the masons of the Slave-Emperor at Kutab-ud-din; by the walls of Tughlakabad and Firozabad now given over to the inantle of the "bitter karela"; by the jewelled chambers and crimson battlements set up by the most

splendid of all earthly dynasties; and, after the battles and sieges, the pillage and slaughter of two hundred years, by the shot-shattered Kashmere gate, and—last of all—by the haze of factory and railway smoke that is the best evidence to-day, of the orderliness and peace that our established rule has brought in its train. Always has this wide, flat expanse of land beside the Jumna been the Naboth's vineyard. Men have called it by many names, Indraprastha, Lalkot, Fort Rai Pithora, Firozabad, Shahjehanabad—all have meant just Delhi, and Delhi it will remain until the human race has forgotten how to read and write. The Aryan race has had but three capitals of surpassing size, strength and significance—Rome and London for its southern and northern branches in Europe,' and one, Delhi, for those darker brethren who pushed so early and so suddenly towards the noonday sun. Here there was a first encampment of men of pale, fine-ly-cut faces in remote ages, and romance early wove a web round his forlorn and exposed outpost of the high-bred Aryians amidst the Indian aborigines, with their broad, clumsy black faces and squat figures. Kings from the first, among these feeble folk the Aryan immigrants had soon leisure enough to begin that quarrelling among themselves that cannot precede complete and settled conquest. The Pandavas, who settled here, engaged in war after war with 'their own nearest km, and their eventual extinction—after a struggle that is recorded in an Indian Illiad written contemporaneously with Homer's—will always be remembered by the Aryan touch that marks the final scene. To English readers the story of the recognition of the returned Ulysses by his dog bridges thirty centuries in a flash. In the Mahabharata the sturdy determination of Yudhishthira to go to hell with his dog rather than enter heaven without him strikes a common racial chord that an Englishman, perhaps, of all Aryans, will understand to-day.

SOUTH AMERICA'S DIFFICULTIES. Much is written nowadays concerning the remarkable progress of South America, but the cosmopolitan nations which people that wealthy country have many difficulties to contend with. A very impressive picture of the dark side 1 of South America is painted by a writer in Blackwood's Magazine, who discusses problems associated with the settlement of new country in the republics. His indictment of Brazil is emphatic; "All men are armed in Brazil," he writes. "The central government is weak. .The Brazilians increase slowly, or not at all. Being, with few exceptions, halfbreds, they need to be recruited by the unmixed races on either side, or else they tend to die out. Their families are small and unhealthy." The British, French and German settlers can look after themselves or they are protected by the capitalists who employ them; but numbers of the Italians who go to Brazil for the coffee harvest return to their homes because "the Governments of these countries do not protect the settler against the feather-headed, brutal and corrupt usage at the hands of judicial and police officials." The writer complains, that many immigrants are highly desirable, and that the "white slave" traffic is "horribly active" along the South American coast. He believes that immigrants who would be of great value to the republics could be protected if the police did their duty, but he declares that the judicial and police establishments in South America are maintained generally "for any purpose except the avovved one." "The police are," he states, "the political agents of the men m power, and because they are indispensable they must not be punished for their excesses. ..Their hand is heavy upon the poor settler in town or country, If a commissary of poliee desires the goodlooking daughter of a small tradesman and finds himself denied he will tax the' father to ruin." The writer is exceedingly outspoken in his references to Buenos Ayres, which boasts of its civilisation. His whole article is a powerful indictment of scandalous corruption, and unfortunately there is no reason for t«J ■ that his com P laints ar e exagger-