United Colleges - Vox Yearbook (Winnipeg, Manitoba Canada)

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governments of these lands are now freed from Turkish rule. China has been riddled with foreign influence. Japan, the one Asiatic na¬ tion which remained absolutely independent, has done so at the price of accepting western methods in all the arts of peace and war. Asia has been the cradle not only of civil¬ ization itself, but of all the great religions. Out of Mesopotamia came the germs that developed into the three systems that now hold the whole western world. The first was Hebraism, which developed very early in Palestine. From Hebraism sprang the other two, first, Christian¬ ity, and, in 622 A.D., Mohammedanism. The latter from small beginnings at Mecca and Medina in the Arabian desert became the most war-like proselytizing religion of the world. In the Middle Ages it extended even to Spain. Today it numbers 175,000,000 followers in Asia and Africa alone. From the Aryan group in Asia as well as from the Semitic have come great religions. The Persians developed Zoroastrianism, based upon the principle of the conflict between good and evil; and the Hindus originated Brahman¬ ism and its outgrowth Buddhism, which be¬ tween them now numbers perhaps 250,000,000 people in Asia. From the yellow man, too, has sprung a great system, that which Confucius originated in the 5th century B.C. and which has been the religion of most of the Chinese ever since. The Western Invasion After Vasco de Gama discovered the ocean route around Africa to India in 1497-98, the bulk of the trade-traffic was carried by sailing vessels rather than by overland caravans. With¬ in 50 years the Portuguese navigators had pushed still farther, to China and Japan, and had established a line of trading posts which amounted to a coastal empire. In the first years of the 17th century Holland, England, and France had also their commercial companies in the far East. Just before the middle of the 18th century there began a 50 years’ duel between England and France for the supremacy of southern Asia, England at length coming out victorious. In the meantime Russia had started across Siberia in 1580 and within 80 years had obtained this largest slice of Asia to the Pacific Ocean and the Amur River, unopposed by the rest of Europe and weakly questioned by the Turk. In the 18th and 19th centuries American clipper ships from Salem, Boston, and Provid¬ ence did a flourishing trade in tea, coffee, ivory, spices, and fine fabrics, and it was an American, Commodore Perry, who opened the doors of Japan in 1854, after they had been closed to the western world for a century and a half. The war between China and Japan in 1894-95 resulted in the cession of Formosa, or Taiwan as the Japanese call it, and Pescadores to Japan, and the Russo-Japanese War resulted in the cession of the southern half of the island of Sakhalin to Japan in 1905, while Korea was annexed to the island empire in 1910. The Philippines were transferred to the United States at the close of the Spanish-American War in 1898. In the last decade of the 19th century various attempts were made to shorten the distance between Europe and Asia. The Suez Canal was dug, connecting the Mediterranean with the Red Sea so that ships could go through to the Indian Ocean without rounding Africa. Russia built railroads across Siberia and Cen¬ tral Asia, and Germany was busy with a pro¬ ject more momentous still, a railway from Ber¬ lin to Bagdad—and perhaps beyond. However, despite this long familiarity with the products of Asia, and this history of active commercial relations, the country and the peo¬ ple have remained unknown to us almost down to our own day. Mission aries going to India and China found people who had been doing things the same way for so many thousands of years that it was almost impossible to teach them any other way. Nor could the bustling West understand the viewpoint of people whose minds seemed to work to set grooves. (Continued on page 42) 11

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of islands, has an inhabitable area little larger than Manitoba, yet contains more than six times as many people as the whole of Canada. The Centuries Asia has been called the cradle of the human race, and some scientists have pointed to de¬ finite regions such as the Caucasus or Asia Minor as the first abode of civilized man, the place from which he migrated to Europe and southern Asia carrying his primitive culture with him. However this may be, Asia can show re¬ mains of the oldest known civilization in the world except Egypt. At Troy in Asia Minor, the peninsula lying between the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, the heroes of Homer were fighting 3,000 years or more ago, and archaeolo¬ gists have found on the same site cities still older than the one they fought for. In Caucasia, the broad isthmus between the Black Sea and the Caspian, lay Colchis, the rich and fertile land whither Greek legend says that Jason went in search of the Golden Fleece. Scientists tell us that here the stone-fruit trees such as the peach, the apricot, and cherry first de¬ veloped from the same wild ancestor. Here, too, are the ruins of the great old cities of Armenia, and here rises the snow-capped peak of Mount Ararat, nearly 17,000 feet high, where the Bible tells us Noah’s ark struck land after that excessively moist season commonly re¬ ferred to as the flood. Palestine along the Mediterranean coast of the Arabian peninsula is the scene of Bible story and of the development of the ancient Hebrew civilization. Persia as a political power dates back to 559 B.C. when Cyrus made his sweeping conquest. And oldest of all civiliza¬ tions in the world, except Egypt, is that of Mesopotamia in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, where there were great cities as early as 3,000 B.C., followed by the empires of Babylonia and Assyria. In the two other fertile flood plains besides Mesopotamia—where people could cultivate the arts of peace protected by ocean, desert, and mountain barriers—there were early civiliza¬ tions, though as yet the historians have not ben able to prove quite how old. In China there are definite records as far back as 1100 B.C. In India the princes rode on elephants and lived in splendid palaces at the time of Alex¬ ander’s campaign to the Indus in the 4th cen¬ tury B.C. For thousands of years, however, the civil¬ ization of Asia stood still. The Indians of Alex¬ ander’s time were skilled in all the arts they ever possessed down to the time of the British occupation. The Chinese preceded Europe in the invention of printing, paper making, porcelain, guns, gunpowder, fine weaving and perhaps the compass. But having found a good way of writing, governing, making cloth, and tilling the soil 3,000 years ago, they simply stopped seeking for new methods. The Arabs, sweeping over the feeble rem¬ nants of Greek and Roman civilization in the early Christian. centuries, absorbed and de¬ veloped the learning they fell heir to. Through¬ out the Middle Ages they led the world in agri¬ culture, building, weaving, metal working, and mathematical science. But their culture has remained at the same stage ever since, while the West has been forging ahead, as witness the fact that today most of Asia is politically in the hands of Europe. Russia has put her stamp on the new countries of Siberia and the old countries of Central Asia and Transcaucasia, more than one-third of the area of the continent. Britain has occupied India and scattered points such as Aden, in Arabia, so that at the begin¬ ning of the World War I, she already con¬ trolled one-ninth of Asia. In Arabia and Persia, too, European forces are at work, and the new 10

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Mr. Chairman, ladies and gentlemen: HAVE the very great honor tonight of de¬ livering the valedictory of the class you are toasting at this banquet, the class of 1943. It is more than an honor, it is a supreme privilege to speak for this particular class. Those of you who know the class of ’43 will agree that with¬ out doubt it is a paragon of all graduating classes. The more discerning of you will have realized before this that in this small group of men and women is caught up every possible virtue, every imaginable attribute, and every conceivable merit. United College has never seen before, nor will she see again such a model of perfection, such a consummate master¬ piece as she sees exemplified in this class of 1943. Now that we are all friends . . . Actually the class of ’43 is not an unusual class. We have our brilliant people, they who carry away the scholarships, who continually amaze—and embarrass—the rest of us with their keen and steady learning. I do not believe that we have any fanatics, either religious or political. We have duly sent our quota of men to worship at the shrine of The Manitoban. Members among us have won the usual awards and prizes. Some of us are minutely sensitive to crisis and defeat. Some among us are phil¬ osophers—members of that doughty clan who instead of crying over spilt milk would prob¬ ably console themselves with the thought that it was four-fifths water in any case. We are not an unusual class. No one of us has done anything great—no one of us has done anything particularly ridiculous—except at stunt night—on which occasions we took first prize. As was once said of another class, we have given the college several good laughs . . . one or two of which sit at the head table to¬ night. However, there is no hesitancy in describ¬ ing one accomplishment of the class of ’43 as unusual—that accomplishment was tq produce from our ranks a lady stick so completely charming, and a man who has mErcle so excep¬ tional a senior stick. Superficially, that is our class. Its com¬ ponents are a diverse lot, and I feel that at the present moment many of them are uneasy. They do not know what I am going to say about them. They do not wish to be included in any generalization of class opinion for they would feel misrepresented and they would feel embarrassed. Thus, while I am here this evening speaking to you for the one purpose of interpreting the class of ’43 for everyone here, for the college as a whole, indeed, for the whole of our society —for presumably our society has not only a stake but an interest in us—while I must inter¬ pret the class of ’43 for the members of that class of ’43, while this is my task, I think it will VALEDICT The Valedictory Address delivered by John H. Howes at the annual become evident that valedictories are actually personal things and that any attempt to assess individual opinion and consolidate it into mass opinion is impossible in a college class. I do not claim to speak for the entire class as such. It would be interesting to examine the trends in valedictories during the last quarter century. If allowances were made for com¬ pletely personal idiosyncrasy, these ' documents would form a pattern of thought of the young men and women of the times. It would be even more interesting to note the gradual shift in that pattern of thought from a light-hearted and even light-headed optimism in the twenties through a period of confusion, blurred outlines and bewilderment in the early thirties, de¬ veloping into a dead disillusionment as the decade ended. And now we see that the whole process has apparently culminated during the last few years in a hard core of cynicism. We have all felt it. We have all at some time or an¬ other felt the despair of a defeated idealism— when that fervent idealism of youth is crumpled by circumstance. But how much more power¬ ful is the result of such a process when the forces of pircumstance that defeat the natural buoyancy are world-wide convulsions—the great economic collapse and now this great war. It has been said almost too often to bear repetition that we are another lost generation, born in the aftermath of 1918, adolescent in the aftermath of 1929, and now adult in the midst of a fierce revolutionary war. A few of 12