The 'Yellow Peril'

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVI, Issue 17, 30 April 1908, Page 9

The 'Yellow Peril'

Lord Wolseley was, we believe, the man who corned the apt and now universally used expression, € Yellow Peril ', to signify the things tJhat may befall when the giant sforees of the East awake up and train and atm>. The Russo-Japanese war served to open the eyes of the West tot the vast potentialities of conquest that exist in the dormant nations of the Orient wihen they have rubbed the sleep out of their eyes, and stretched their

limbs, and got to work. It may. be (long before a new Tamerlane or Zenghis Khan will give the Caucasian natiotns cause to sleep uneasily o' nights. But there are more than Father Benson who foresee the Armageddon of the future in the clash of yellow hosts upon white. And one of these is Lord Wolseley,

On last Sunday the gifted Rev. Dr. Waddell (Dunedin) referred to the things that may be involved in the present awakening of the East— no longer ' the • unchanging East '. ' If '», said he, 'in this great conflict between the yellow and the white man in the not distant future we failed, \t would be for the same reasons as had birougjht about the ruin of Rome. We shall go down, not because of the material forces outside our gates, but because the spirit has left the body within. Li&e the wild tribes, that swept do.w n upon ancient Rome, -they will be but the eagles of judgment that remove the infecting carcase from the face of the earth. . . . The real yellow peril" is not these nations, vast though they be, that are rising on the distant horizon. It is our own lust of the yellow metal and what" the yellow metal can purchase. It is to be engrossed 1 with our own interests and our own ambitions and to be dead to the summons to lead the Gospel in through these great opening doors of- the Orient. if we fail to • do that we may live to see ourselves where proud', imperial, selMoving Rome found herself— 'in the dust at the feet of Vandal and Hun.'

The learned and gentle Doctor might-4i'ad he been so minded— have referred to the ' white pernl ',- that gives a real terror to the one that is called ' yellow '. We refer to race-suicide— t o the dog-and-cat-and-canary-bird family. But for the ' white peril ', the Western nations could sit serene and unafraid, and look squarely and defiantly in the face of an armed and warlike Orient. But the cult of the human infant is, among many, giving place to the cult of the bull-pup and the Japanese poodle. And the slant-eyed Orientals .may yet be ' the scourge of God ', as_Attil a and his Huns and Vandals and Ostrogoths were fourteen centuries ago— to puriish the - nations for their sins.