CHANGE EVERYWHERE.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LV, Issue 309, 22 May 1913, Page 4

CHANGE EVERYWHERE.

The Rt. Hon. James Bryce, who has just completed his term as Ambassador: to the United States, was president by proxy of the International Congress of Historical Studies, which met in London last month. Mr. Bryee "spoke as a traveller." What he had to say was full of interest. He showed Jluit..to wander through, strange countries and see what .Nature had gi,v<;|i to their peoples and what the peoples had made of Nature was one way, and not the worst way, of approaching history. What was it, he asked, that the traveller saw to-day in India, in Africa, in the two Americas, in Australasia, and the isles of the Pacific? He saw the smaller, weaker, and more backward races changing or vanishing under the impact of civilised man; their languages disappearing; their religious beliefs withering; their tribal organisations dissolving; their customs fading slowly awav, first from use and then from memory. Some tribes, like the warlike Araucanians of Chili, were dying out by disease. Others, like the Red Indians of Oklahoma and the Maoris of New Zealand, were being absorbed into the white population.. Others, again, like the Finnish tribes of North-East Russia, were being insensibly permeated by the customs and language of their more numerous .neighbors, so as to lose whatever racial quality they had. From the blending of others witli immigrants streaming in a hybrid race was growing up, in which, as in the case of the mixture of Chinese with the natives of Tahiti and Hawaii, the stronger and more civilised element seemed fated to predominate. In other cases peoples too large and powerful to' lose their individuality were nevertheless beginning to be so afl'ected by European influences as to find themselves passing into a new circle of ideas and a new set of institutions. Change was everywhere, and the process of change was so rapid that the past would soon be forgotten. It was a past the like of which could never recur. Ethnologists, philologists, and students of folklore were at work recording those expiring • forms of speech and embodiments in custom of primitive human thought; and not a moment should be lost in saving the precious relies. There was one other aspect of the present n<re of the world that had a profound and novel meaning for the historian. The world was becoming one ill an altogether new sense. More than four centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in tho process by which the European races had now gained dominion over nearly the whole of the earth. The last great step in that process was the partition of Africa between three European Powers a little more than twenty years ago. Now. almost every part of the earth's surface, except the territories of China and Japan, was either owned or controlled by five or six European races. Right Creat Powers swayed the political destinies of the globe, and there were only two other countries that could be thought of as likely to enter after a while" into the rank of ftreat Powers. Similarly, a few European tongues had overspread all the continents, except Asia, and even there it seemed probable that those few

European tongues would before long be learnt and used by the educated classes of all countries who would thus get ( into touch with European ideas. . It was likely that by A.D. 2000 more than ninetenths of the human race would be speaking less than twenty languages. Already there were practically only four great religions in the world. Within a century the minor religions might have gone; and possibly only three great faiths would remain, with such accelerated swiftness did change now move. Those things which were already strong were growing stronger; those already weak grew weaker and were ready to vanish away. Thus, as the earth had been narrowed through the new forces science had placed at their disposal, and as the larger human groups absorbed or assimilated the smaller, the movements of politics, of economics, and of thought in each of its regions became more closely interwoven witli those of every other. Whatever happened in any part of the globe had now a significance for every other part. Industrial disputes were felt more widely over its surface than those earthquakes in Java which the seismograph Tecor'od at Washington. The money markets were affected simultansously. Each Great Power, were it European, Asiatic or American, was in close contact with all the others; it was allied, or friendly (or possibly not too friendly) with some one or more of the others. The great wave that swung round the world made its last ripples felt in the world's remotest corner.. In regions till lately unexplored, in the sombre depths of African or Brazilian forests, or. on the oases that lay scattered along ilie dreary deserts of Mongolia, the fortunes of the native tribes were affected by what passed in European capitals. Even in the one continent which stood almost wholly outside the web of international relations, South America, finance reached where politics did not neach. Finance, even more than politics, had now made the world one community, and finance was more closely interwoven with politics than ever before. World history was tending to become one history, the history no longer of many different races of mankind occasionally affecting one another's fortunes, but the history of mankind as a whole, the fortunes of each branch henceforth bound up with those of the others. In these conditions, the historian of tha future would need an amplitude of conception and a power of grouping his figures like that of Tintoretto or Michael Angelo, if he were to handle so vast a canvas. Seeing that they were, by the work they followed, led to look further back and more widely around than most of their fellow-citizens could do, were they not as students of history specially called upon to do what they could to try to reduce every source of international ill-feeling? They had the best reason for knowing how great was the debt each "one owed to the other, how essential not only to the material development of each, but also to its intellectual and spiritual advance, was the greatness and the welfare of the others and the common friendship of all.