THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1907.

Wairarapa Age, Volume XXIX, Issue 8323, 3 January 1907, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. THURSDAY, JANUARY 3, 1907.

In the latest number of the Nineteenth Century Magazine Mr J. Ellis Barker contributes a most strikingly interesting article on the future of Great Britain. The writer concludes a very powerful indictment of the weakness of the present position of the British Empire as follows:—'Pride goeth before destruction, and a.haughty spirit before a fall.' In the forties of the last century England produced more coal, more cotton goods, more iron, and she had more money, more miles of railway, and more ships than the rest of the world. English merchants began to believe that, as Mr Cobden put it, England was destined by Nature to be, and always to remain, the workshop of the world, and, being- in power, they threw away the economic and political defences of their country. Since then. the glory and greatness of England have much diminished. Industrially, commercially and financially England has greatly declined. Her commercial and maritime supremacy is seriously threatened by the United States and Germany, who have been advancing with giant strides whilst Great Britain has stood still. What will be the future of Great Britain and the British Empire? Will Great Britain learn the lesson of history? The eleventh hour has arrived. The history of three thousand years teaches us that all the good thingsiof this world, land and riches, commerce and shipping, are not to the peaceful and to the feeble, but to the warlike and to the strong; not to the sluggard, armed with a 'scientific' formula pronounced by a learned theorist, but to energetic and ambitious men of action, armed with common sense; that wealth and power can be preserved only by military strength; that wealth is a bad substitute for power; that power may easily be converted into wealth, but that moneybags do not defend themselves; that strength is better than wealth; that the neglect of the army and the decay of agriculture have been fatal to all great commercial States

of the past, from Phoenicia to Holland; that huge towns devour the strength of the country. Great Britain has allowed her agriculture to decay and she has, at the bidding of interested manufacturers and traders of crazy theorists, erected the mightiest economic fabric the world has seen upon a single pillar. That pillar stands upon foreign ground, and foreign I nations are engaged in sawing through that pillar. The British Empire can be preserved only as long as the British fleet is supreme, and the British fleet can remain supreme only as long as Great Britain can afford to maintain a larger fleet than any other nation. Great Britain is no. longer the richest nation in the world. The outlook for Great Britain and her colonies is very serious and threatening, for might is right in international politics. The law of the survival of the fittest and strongest, which rules the' whole animal and vegetable creation, applies with equal force to man and to his political associations.. Great Britain and the British Empire stand at the parting of the ways. The greatest danger to Great Britain is her weakness. Great Britain must have strength commensurate with the extent of her possessions, or she will perish. The British Empire is merely, a geographical expression. In its unorganised state it is as little an empire as was the Dutch worldempire or the Phoenician world-em-pire of old. The greatest States of all times have perished because they have not acted in accordance with the spirit of the times. Unless Great Britain reforms herself, adapts herself to modern conditions, abandons her insane and pseudo-liberal policy' of drift, neglect, and mammoni'sm, miscalled non-interference, individualism, and free trade; unless she husbands and develops her .resources and increases her rapidly-ebbing national strength by reconstituting her agriculture and making the population warlike and prepared for 1 war; and unless the British Empire is unified—for only the united and organised strength of the whole of the Empire can suffice to defend it —Great Britain, and with her the British Empire, may, by the inexorable law of History and of Nature, follow the way which Phoenicia,, Carthage, Athens, Rome, Constantinople, the Arab Empire, Amalfi, Pisa, Genoa, Venice, and the Dutch Empire have gone in the past.