How Civilization is
pp. 11-12 · Read in the full issue
Menaced Opinions of J. H. Curie, World Traveller, Who is About to Visit New Guinea
NEW GUINEA and Papua, in the coming month, will be examined by the wise eye of Mr. J. H. Curie, famous writer of travel books, who has travelled one and a half million miles during his lifetime, and has looked into every hole and corner of this old earth. He leaves by the “Macdhui” this month to see personally “the romance of the Morobe goldfield.”
Those who meet Mr. Curie will hear some fascinating comment upon human kind and the probable future of the world.
“I sometimes try to picture this world as it will be a thousand years hence,” he said, to the Editor of the Pacific Islands Monthly, “and the mental picture makes me sick with horror. Mankind is doing so much to control the forces of nature, and so little to control itself. Unless something is done to prevent the rapid inter-breeding of races, I can see a world completely populated, in a few hundred years, by a crinkly-haired, chocolate coloured people, with some attractive physical characteristics, but with mental and moral standards very different to the standards set up by the great nations of to-day.”
Mr. Curie has just arrived in Sydney from South America; and he had pointed comment to make about the racial mix tures which he has studied during his various visits to that continent.
“In Brazil, for instance, one sees some ten millions of African negroes, the des cendants of slaves, rapidly breeding in with the Brazilians, who themselves are a mixture of Portuguese and South Ameri can Indian races. Imagine the Brazilian population of a few hundred years hence!”
Mr. Curie believes that another great European war is inevitable, and it will come soon; and its effect on European civilisation will be calamitous. It will be largely a war between aerial navies, and the destruction which will be wrought by bombs from aeroplanes will be something that at present almost baffles description.
Such a calamity—and it is almost upon us —will destroy much of European civi lisation as we know it now; yet this mad ness of “nationalism” is driving steadily on to war.
“This madness of nationalism,” which Mr. Curie regards as a threat to our present civilisation is largely the creation of the great “popular” newspapers—con cerns which, for the most part, are largely over-capitalised, and which in conse quence bend all their energies and thought to the making of dividends, and subvert to that end the primary purpose of news papers, which is to lead and mould public opinion. “They sacrifice all considerations to that of gaining circulation,” he said.
“Their main and indeed only purpose is to excite the people, whip up public in terest, so that newspapers may be bought; and how easy it is to do this by scares, alarms and excursions in international politics.
“Ninety per cent, of the civilised peoples of the earth do not want wars,” he con tinued. “They want only peace and com parative comfort and freedom from anxiety. And how easy it would be to
create such a world, now that science has come in such large measure to our aid.
There are a number of international so cieties, working to that end; yet all their efforts, over a period of years, can be destroyed in a day by one pin-headed, irresponsible newspaper proprietor, trying to work up circulation with an ill informed, sensational article playing on national or racial prejudices.
“No,” he went on, in reply to the obvious question. “I can see no remedy for it. What individual or government will dare to interfere with ‘the liberty of the press’—even although the press—or a section of it —is drivng the world to self destruction!”