WELLINGTON KOO
Chinese Ambassador to Great Britain
Photo from Adachi
YUKIO OZAKI, M.P. AND EX-MINISTER OF JUSTICE
The most prominent Liberal in Japan
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While, as has been shown, Australia has for twenty years pursued a course that threatens to lead toward separation from England, New Zealand has bound herself closer and closer. Australia, however, has been extremely shy of any semblance of rupture. She does not want to break away. She feels her isolation too much. But what she wants is in a sense the rights that American states have within the Union. She wants to be independent, to be able to develop in her own way, to expand, if necessary, without danger of attack. This spirit is inherent in the Australian temperament. When I told any Australian that I was traveling and tramping on "me own," he could not understand it. He could not go without a mate. He wanted to be sure that if he got into any scrape and was with his back to the wall, his mate was there to help him. Still, he wanted to fight alone. It did not seem to occur to any of these people that a civilized man might go the wild world over and not have occasion to fight. And this trait comes out in Australian international relations. She wants to pursue the White-Australia policy contrary to sentiment in England, to develop her own navy, to hold the whole continent against the time when full nationhood will have become a reality. But for the time at least she will not declare her independence of Great Britain. She will not even give Britain the imperial preference in trade which would compensate her for her trouble. But she did show in the last war that she realized her responsibilities. In the Boer War it was said that her assistance was merely for the sake of giving her men adventure and practice for possible later use in her own defense. And in this war conscription was defeated because, as it was openly declared, it was not certain what the turn of affairs in Europe might be. It was felt imperative that the men be not all gone and the continent left undefended. And that contingency was voiced by the Premier of Queensland as involving—Japan. To the outsider, Australia's attitude seems extremely selfish, but to enthusiastic young Australia, with the wide world before her, with a future that looks as promising as that of America, it seems the only logical one. And as long as her potential enemies do not take the trouble to show by deeds that they are not enemies, her reasoning is not unjustifiable.
But a strange thing has happened to Australia. She has got what she was after, and now she hardly wants it. She fought for the imperial conference method of settling imperial affairs. Australians have time and again declared that though an empire, they are a nation first and foremost. That the empire represented too heterogeneous a list of peoples for them to forget that an Indian, though part of the empire, is still an inferior as far as they are concerned. And Australia realized that the mother country could not see eye to eye with her on that score. Yet she insists on the Anglo-Japanese Alliance remaining in some form acceptable to her and to America. How is that to be? What has happened since peace was declared?
Australia and New Zealand were loudest in the protest against the return of the South Sea Islands to the Germans. New Zealand soldiers had taken Samoa; the Australian navy—what there was of it—had cleared the neighboring seas of German raiders. But though they asked that Germany be deprived of the possessions, and though the leaders thundered for a New Zealand mandate over Samoa and an Australian mandate over New Guinea, the people realized that they did not particularly care for the burden of looking after these lands. Mr. Hughes of Australia urged annexation. The people as a whole preferred that Great Britain should annex them and guarantee the dominions against possible dangers from enemy control. They felt they could not stand the cost of governing them. They were even not averse to their being turned over to America. They have come to realize that they were much better off before the war, when they merely contributed their small quota to the support of the navy; now Great Britain has intimated that she can no longer maintain that navy without their full share in its costs. Besides, the mandate over the islands is not going to be simple.
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Before giving consideration to the developments which not even the Australasians had anticipated, let us look upon the gains they have made. They have acquired some new possessions which make of them an empire within the empire, as it were. The islands of the south Pacific are to be ruled as though they were an integral part of New Zealand and Australia, yet they have their own facets just as the Dominions had their own problems within the empire. They afford them certain commercial advantages: copra and cocoa from Samoa, phosphate from Nauru, which alone has an estimated deposit amounting to forty-two million tons. Nauru is of utmost importance to them because they are extensive agricultural countries. It has been agreed that Great Britain take 42%, Australia 42%, and New Zealand 16% of the export. The South Seas as a whole supply 14.7% of the world's copra supply, and this may yet be greatly increased. But this is nothing compared with the advantages they afford as ports of call. Further, if the plan of linking the islands together by wireless is effected, they will become an outer frontier for the Antipodes of inestimable value. There is even a faint suggestion of binding them together into one separate governmental entity,—a buffer state, as it were, between the big powers in the Pacific.