NEW INSTITUTION.

Auckland Star, Volume LVIII, Issue 109, 11 May 1927, Page 7

NEW INSTITUTION.

FIRST COLONIAL CONFERENCE. (British Official Wireless.) (Received 11.30 a.m.) RUGBY, May 10. The Secretary of State for the Dominions and Colonies, Mr. L. S. Amery, will to-day open the Colonial Conference. This will be attended by senior officials representing 24 colonies, protectorates and mandated territories. The conference will be the first of its kind. The result of it may be that it will become an Empire institution like Vie Imperial Conference. The territories to be represented have a total area of about 3,300,000 square miles and a total population of about 60,000,000. Most of the people belong to non-European races. Mr. L. S. Amery (Secretary of State for the Dominions,) addressing the Governors Colonial Conference, said that while there was a large measure of unity in the colonial problem of the Empire, there was a small structural administrative unity. Each Colonial Government had its own administrative medical and other services, its own scales of pay and pensions, but the whole system, with its liaphazard complexity and lack of coordination would not be tolerated by "our more logical neighbours across the Channel." Nevertheless, the British system had certain great advantages and he was of opinion it would be a profound mistake to scrap the essentially local and individual basis of the British system with its accompanying local pride and patriotism in favour of some uniform, logical scheme devised at Whitehall and then imposed from without by a service more interested in its individual careers than inspired by local sentiment. On the contrary there was no doubt that the principle of autonomy and self-sufficiency could be carried too far. — (A. and N.Z. and Sydney "Sun.")