The Pacific Triangle

by Sydney Greenbie

I sought to obtain a bit of information once from a dispenser of "understanding" located in New York, but he tried to lead me off the scent. It was not, he feared, to his country's credit that such and such facts be known. He was very sensitive, and gave me no assistance. This covering up of our weaknesses before the eyes of our neighbors is certain to lead to disaster. This putting our best foot forward, only to have the other ready for a nasty kick, is not going to bring about amity. If there is an ideal worthy of emulation in any race in the Pacific, we ought to know and honor it. If there is a sore which needs scientific political treatment, let us attend to it. Our problems are well defined, if we will but look for them; our obligations are clear, if we will but undertake them courageously.

We are not going to solve our problems as we did with the coming of Japan into the range of the world,—by adulation. To-day we are suffering from the effects of having made the Japanese feel that they are perfect and to be adored. The problem is one of unadulterated education, of education in the simple arts of self-support among the primitive people, and self-government among the more advanced.

But if our efforts are to be fruitful we must avoid abstract education which leads to hair-splitting. It is to be education in the fundamentals,—education in the use of hands and brain for self-support and mutual happiness founded on justice. It is to be education of ourselves as well as of those we wish to elevate.

But the problem is even deeper than that. Merely elevating other races will not preclude conflict. Germany was well educated and on a level with, if not in many ways superior to the nations roundabout her. Her very development created friction. And the talk of Japan as a menace is largely due to the fact that Japan has grown out of the lowly state in which her exclusionists had placed her for two hundred and fifty years. As yet China is no "menace," for China has still her teeming hordes who curtail one another's usefulness.

Nor, as I have said in the chapter on Australasia, will the problem of our relationship with the people of the Pacific be solved by the effort of labor to keep up its own high standards by the exclusion of those of lower standard.

Nor will the problem be solved by our assuming more and more protectorates over simple nations unused to the tricks of diplomacy.

Our problem will be solved only by working assiduously for international coöperation. Our problem will clear away when all nations establish departments open to civil-service appointments of people who will enter the field of education and uplift work without other compensation possible than that of an honest salary. There should be a Department of Education for the Pacific in which the people of the United States do out of their own funds what we did in China out of the moneys paid in the Boxer indemnity. This department would study the races of the Pacific with a view to finding what are the special requirements of each particular people and how they can be supplied. There should be a Bureau of Social Hygiene and Sanitary Engineering recruited from the American student body with luring pay, drawing thousands of young physicians and engineers out into the various Pacific islands to study the questions of the eradication of disease and the care of body and mind. There should be a Bureau of Civics and International Law carrying to the peoples of the Pacific whose simplicity lays them open to the chicanery of political parasites the simple truths of human relationships as we understand them. So the entire fabric of civilization might be spread over the waters of the Pacific. But to guard against the possibility of some sword piercing it and rending it must come the voice of civilization calling shame upon the present practices of any nation now operating in the Pacific in other than pacific ways.

All this must be done not by America alone, but by all the people now in a position to coöperate. Just as Japan codified her laws and changed them in conformity with those of the West, so as to regain full rights over foreigners in her own territory, so must all the nations reorganize their laws in conformity with the best interests of all. There must be judges in all lands who know the laws of other lands as well as their own and an attempt be made to bring them all in greater conformity to a universal standard of justice, of right and wrong. There must be educators set to work studying the educational systems of nations on the Pacific so as to bring the methods more and more in line with one another. There must be departments of health advising one another how so to remedy conditions as to eliminate the danger of spread of plague. It is not enough that we have an excellent department of health vigilant in the exclusion of plague; our department of health should co-operate with that of Japan and of Australasia, and of every island in the Pacific. In other words, we must realize that the problems of every group anywhere in the world affect for good or ill our own welfare.

Our problem in the Pacific is therefore ten times more complicated than that which faced the powers in Morocco, Africa and Persia. While the diversity of nations was great in Europe, in the Pacific it is greater. But while the relationship in the Balkans was in some cases close, not only in sheer propinquity, but in development, in the Pacific not only is the blood running in the veins of the races in many cases extremely alien, one to the other, but the distances separating them in space and in development make coöperation and getting together difficult. This makes it easier for selfish nations to place themselves as wedges between them. The scramble after mandates in the Pacific indicates the recognition of their importance.

But in inverse ratio,—in so far as the races of the Pacific have none of the irritating intimacy which obtained in Europe, the problem is clearer. The repetition of the intrigues which Germany, through her daughter on the Russian throne, could carry out, is here impossible. Only once in my knowledge has royal intermarriage been attempted and it proved a failure. The Japanese changed their law against the marriage of their royalty with royalty of another race in favor of Korea—and to forestall a Japanese-Korean union we are told, the Ex-Emperor of Korea committed suicide. Insurrection followed. The marriage has since taken place, but Korea is no longer an independent empire.