NOTES AND COMMENTS

Ashburton Guardian, Volume 62, Issue 8, 21 October 1941, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS

FOUR STAGES IN COLONIES. t * “ Colonial development has four said Lord Hailey, speaking in the House of Lords, “The first is the rudimentary stage of introducing peace and order and that amount of stability which will allow the inhabitants of the country to take the first steps to secure their own material welfare and advancement. The second stage is one that follows fast on the first —namely taking measures to prevent the exploitation of the inhabitants of the colonies by private interests or to safeguard them from the abuse of authority. There follows a third stage, more positive, more constructive, a stage which involves the expansion of the social services. That is a stage which is of the highest importance. It is, as I say, of a positive and constructive character, and ,it is one which should engage all our energies. There is a final stage, a stage in which the fulfilment of our trusteeship for the colonies will be tested by ourselves in Great Britain and also by the colonial peoples by the measure to which we have afforded them opportunities for the management of their own affairs and by the extent to which we have admitted them to partake of self-governing institutions.” ERRORS OF VERSAILLES. The charge against Hitler’s new order, says “The Times”, is not that it has made a large part of the Continent into a single economic unit, but that it has created this unit on a basis not of free and equal co-operation, but of exploitation in the interests, and for the military purposes, of a single country. That some new order is an essential condition of the future peace and prosperity of Europe few will now be found to contest. The danger is that revulsion from Hitler’s methods and achievements may, at the moment of his defeat, carry us back into the anarchy of a Europe divided against herself by a multiplicity of strategic and economic frontiers, and tempt ,us to renew the cardinal errors of 1919. That danger can be averted only if we constantly remind ourselves of the lessons which the war has brought home to us. Another error of 1919 which is particularly present to our minds today was the elimination of Russia from the settlement. Little foresight should have been needed to realise that a settlement of Eastern European affairs, made without regard to Russian interests and at a moment when Russia could not make her voice heaid was unlikely to endure. That error at any rate will not be repeated.