When we cross the Pacific to Australia we see the same racial and
national factors at work as in Saxon America. It has taken only a little
over a century for a British or Nordic stock, now numbering five
millions, to establish itself as occupant and owner of a great
continent. The Australians have had to face both national and racial
problems. The continent was colonized from separate centres, and there
was a tendency on the part of each colony to isolate itself from its
neighbours and grow up into a separate state or nationality. These
separate states or incipient nationalities were united at the
commencement of the present century by the craft of statesmanship which
made the shores of the new continent the frontiers of a national
commonwealth. The British communities in Australia bred and exhibited
the usual Saxon sense of race discrimination; almost from the first they
drew a racial frontier between themselves and the native blacks, and so
strictly has this frontier been maintained that there is no trace of the
vanishing aboriginal blood in the veins of the new nationality. The
50,000 survivors of the original owners of the continent now present a
philanthropic rather than a racial problem. But it is otherwise as
regards the millions of native peoples occupying the countries which
flank the Indian and China seas. Seas are the highways along which
modern peoples spread and invade accessible lands. Hence round their
shores the Australians have erected a racial barrier, admitting the
entrance of peoples of European descent but excluding all others.
The student of racial and national problems cannot afford to pass New
Zealand by. In these two islands English, Scotch, Irish, and Welsh
immigrants have, in the course of the last eighty years, built up a new
nation, now numbering well over a million souls. Here and there in the
islands there has been a tendency for the immigrants to group themselves
according to their inherited nationality, but such separate groupings
tend to disappear as the new national spirit becomes dominant. Herein we
see exhibited a law with which herdsmen are familiar. A herd of cattle
which has occupied a field for some time will resist the intrusion of a
second or strange herd; but turn both herds together into a strange
pasture and mutual antipathies cease almost at once. The arrival in a
new land of immigrants from diverse countries breaks down the national
barriers within which they were born and bred. A national spirit breeds
true only on its native soil; when transplanted to a new land it becomes
plastic and mouldable. A new country dissolves ancient nationalities; no
country illustrates this truth more emphatically than New Zealand.
The relationship which exists between the new nationality of New Zealand
and the ancient owners of the country--the Maori, now numbering about
50,000--is one of a unique kind. The physical differences which separate
the British and Maori types are such in degree that there can be no
question of the distinctness of their racial stocks. In former cases we
have seen that it was the Saxon who drew and guarded the racial
frontier; but in New Zealand each of the contending human stocks has
drawn its racial line, and each regards the other's delimitation with
respect. Such respect is rendered possible because the territorial
frontiers of Maoriland have been clearly defined. Thus wise
statesmanship keeps racial problems in a latent condition in New
Zealand.