WORLD CHANGES

Gisborne Times, Volume XXXVI, Issue 3978, 8 July 1913, Page 6

WORLD CHANGES

NEW FORCES AT WORK. TENDENCY TOWARDS ASSIMILATION. Tlie Right Hon. James Bryce, who has just completed his term as Ambassador to the United tSates, was piesident by proxy of the International Congress of Historical Studies, which lately met in London. The Master of Peterliouse read Mr Bryce’s most interesting address, in which he “spoke as a traveller.” Mr. Bryce said that “we now had a larger conception of history, which we had now come to regard a record of every form of human effort and achievement, concerned not any more definitely with political events and institutions than with all the other factors that had moulded man and all the other expressions his creative activity had found. He had to ask permission to speak as a traveller rather than as a student of MSS. or of printed books. To wander through strange countries and see what Nature had given to their peoples and what the peoples had made of Nature was one way, and not the worst way, of approaching history. The earliest chronicler whose work had come down to them was a traveler. That which Herodotus told them of the physical aspects of the countries he visited and their races and their customs was at least as precious as his narratives of the lonic revolt and the great Persian War. “Now, what was it that the traveller saw to-day in India, in Africa, in the two Americas, in Australasia, and tho 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 away, 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 tlie blending of others with 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. Change was everywhere, and the process of change was so rapid that the past would soon be forgotten. There was one other aspect of the present age of the world that had a profound -and novel meaning for the historian. The world was becoming one in an altogether new sense. Moro than four.,centuries ago the discovery of America marked the first step in the 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 bv five or six European races. Eight Great 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 Great 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 in such wise as to bring those classes into touch with European ideas. It was likely that bv A.D. 2000 moro than nine-tenths of tho human race would be speaking less than twenty languages. Thus, as tho 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 with those of every other. “Whatever happened jn any part of the globe had now a- significance for every othr part. _ Industrial disputes were felt more widely over its surface than those earthquakes in Java which the seismograph recorded at Washington. The money martlets were affected simultaneously. ' Each Great Power, were it European, Asiatic, or American, was in close contact with all the others; it was allied, or friendlv (or possibly not too friendly) with some one or more of the-others* The great wave that swung round the would' made its last ripples felt in the world’s remotest corner. Even in tho one continent which stood almost wholly outside the web of international relations, South America, finance reached where politics did not reach. Finance, oven 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 as a- whole, the fortunes of each branch henceforth bound up with those of the others. In these conditions, the historian of the 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.” , -i ■ - ’ i . j