ATLANTIC AGE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 December 1941, Page 6

ATLANTIC AGE

HISTORY OF MODERN WORLD, SIGNIFICANCE IN PRESENT CONFLICT. “The history of the Ancient World may have been the history of things that happened round the Mediterranean,” said Mr Philip Guedella, the historian, in a recent address. “But the history of the Modern World is, and will be increasingly, the history of things that happen round the Atlantic. That is the significance of the Americas. The countries of the eastern shore —Spain, Portugal, France, England, Scotland, Ireland —found them and populated them and helped to make them what they are. You will find Spain and Portugal indelibly impressed on Latin America, France and Scotland on eastern and western Canada, Ireland imparting its own flavour to the politics (no less than the police force) of the United States, and England a potent influence on the formation of all North America. Not all the children take after their parents. The New Yorker is not the same as Punch: French Canada is a France that never was: France as it might have been if there had been no French Revolution. And stern Spanish ancestors have some difficulty in recognising themselves, in the democracies of Uruguay and Chile. Yet all of them on both sides of the Atlantic are relations, and the future of the world lies in their hands. For the age we live in is an Atlantic age. Its course will not be set by what may happen round the Baltic, that blind-alley of a sea; and the shores of the Mediterranean have shot their bolt in history. They are museum pieces now. But what happens round the Atlantic—that is what matters. At the moment a small group of the Atlantic peoples who live in the top right-hand corner of the map stand between the whole oceanic area and a remarkably unpleasant fate.”