The Pacific Triangle - Sydney Greenbie

Photo from Adachi

DR. SUN YAT-SEN
President of South China Republic

Germany was always regarded as a potential enemy. The colonies had always arched their backs at the proximity of German possessions in the South Seas. When in 1889 Samoa was the bone of contention, the colonies were rather eager to have America take it, in preference to the Germans. Then, as Japan came to the fore, America as a potential protection became more and more obvious to Australasians. The Panama Canal intensified their conviction. They looked forward to a combination of British and American power for the furtherance of peace as they conceived it should be maintained, and consciousness of their own destiny in the Pacific was stimulated. Suddenly they were brought close to the United States. The anti-Japanese riots in California, the annexation of Hawaii, the protectorate over the Philippines all pointed to the Australasians lessons for their own guidance. They could not expect from England the same keen interest in racial questions which manifested itself in America. America demonstrated the dangers of having two unmixable races like the white and the black together; Hawaii showed them that Asiatic immigration is a breeder of trouble. They do not seem to see that circumstances are not the same, that the pressure of population has become much more keen, that industrial conditions in the world to-day are altogether different from what they were when Great Britain refused to have her American colonies put down the kidnapping of Africans; that America to-day has 110,000,000 people and has encouraged them to come from every country in Europe, as Australia does not.

Australia looks only at the most obvious phase of the problem,—that certain people are not happy together. Whether or not she over-estimates her own strength against the pressure of changed conditions, remains to be seen, but she is pursuing her own course with a certain steadfastness that is at once a pathetic blindness and a courageous self-assertion. In a country whose political outlook is essentially generous, whose labor experiments have been extremely costly to her, it strikes one as a great contradiction of principle. How can a labor government be so utterly opposed to the extension of ideal opportunities to laborers from other lands seeking to enjoy them? How can she be so utterly capitalistic on a national scale when nearly everything within her own ken is laboristic? The explanation of this enigma lies in a certain measure in the manner in which Australia has set about making herself independent of her mother country and, while working indirectly for the break-up of the empire, is becoming imperial in her own small way. All these counter currents must be seen clearly before understanding can follow. They whirl about the pillar of imperialism—England—and have come out clearly since the war. They hinge upon the mandates over the South Sea Islands.

THOMAS W. LAMONT