THE Wairarapa Age. MORNING DAILY. "TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1909. TRIUMPHS OF WHITE RULE.
Not least among Mr Roosevelt's many notable, deliverances is an address on "The White Man's Burden,"** which, in January, and therefore in the closing days of his Presidentship, he gave at an African Methodist mass meeting—an address memorable as a statement of high racial principle, and because of the fine tribute it paid to British rule and achieverr. o it in India. The ex-President, it need scarcely be said, stands for the "square deal" from white to coloured peoples as rigorously and impartially as from white to white, and his main purpose on this occasion was to show that in our time the colored people get it. That is quite undeniable as far as British and American methods are concerned, whatever may happen under other flags whose precise significance to the politically inferior race we have little or no means of estimating—except that it is a very fair assumption that the inhuman administration of Belgium in the Congo is grimly unique. In the past it was different, and perhaps necessarily so in the conditions. The primal passions flamed high in comparatively undisciplined minds, and men ranged abroad conquering and colonising, asking nothing more than that demand which has been attributed to Nature of a fair fight and a free field for "her darlmg, the strongest." The result of all the far-casting conquest which originated thus, and has gone on for about four centuries, is to the white people, as Mr Roosevelt estimated, that over one hundred millians of people wholly European now Europe. Itself, that is a wonderful fact, and that while it is swelled by one of the most numerous white nations, the Americans, it also includes the peoples who have won dominion and are building enduring civlisations in Australasia, South America, and South Africa, the remotest countries of the earth. But what does it mean—whatever it has meant—to the subjugated peoples wich variously tinged skins? That while, to quote the ex-President again, the greatest cruelty, suffering, degradation,, and diminution of population have been where native control is unchecked, the greatest ad-
van:es have been made in regions that are under the control or influence of European administrators. To realise this we to recall the abominable cruelties practised under native sway in Ashanti and Zululand, and to contrast with that unrestrained savagery the even-handed justice that followed British suppression of the fetish and the ju-ju in Western Africa, the long peaceful pause under British rule that, has enabled the more timorous South African natives to thrive as they were not allowed to while the Matabele could take the blood-path, and the wonderful betterment of native conditions in Porto Rico Americans took the country over. But the prime test in this respect is India, of course, where European administration has necessarily had and still has io encounter difficulties for which history has no parallel. Mr Roosevelt's testimony in this regard is of immense value and significance. For it is that of an onlooker, a man whose outstanding characteristic is a perfervid devotion to justice regardless of colour or creed, and it is given upon conditions in which British political agitators have protessed to see oppression rampant. What does this
American stickler for the square deal sa7"of W in India"? g That ''itfjus a perthe Roman Empire."
That mistakes ,> \ have]J)eenJ_made, only:| superhuman qualities avoided them in "so gigantic a task. "But that the English administration has been "one" of the most notable and most admirable achievements of the white race during the past two centuries," and has made "for the ° immeasurable benefit of the natives of India themselves." On the whole, said Mr Roosevelt, "there has been a far more resolute effort to do justice, a far more resolutejeffort to secure fair treatment for the'humble and the oppressed during the days of English rule in India than during any other period of recorded Tndian history., England does not draw a penny from India for English purposes: she spends for India the revenues raised in India, and/ they are spent for the benefit of the Indians themselves. Undoubtedly India is a less pleasant place than formerly for the heads ,of tyrannical States. There is now little or no room in it for succeasfirl , freebooter chieftains, for tne despots; who lived in gorgeous splendour whils under their cruel rule the immense mass of their countrymen festered in sodden misery. But the mass of the people have been and are far better off than ever before, and far better off than tbey would now be if English control were overthrown or withdrawn. Indeed, if English control , were now withdrawn [from India f the whole peninsula wGlild fee§§fflß f» chaos of bloodshed arid Violence." That statement ttifty stand as a complete answer to strifemongering British politicians—the more so because it is demonstrably true.
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Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3156, 6 April 1909, Page 4
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811THE Wairarapa Age. MORNING DAILY. "TUESDAY, APRIL 6, 1909. TRIUMPHS OF WHITE RULE. Wairarapa Age, Volume XXXII, Issue 3156, 6 April 1909, Page 4
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