Evening Post. FRIDAY JULY 6, 1925. NEW ZEALAND'S POLICY IN SAMOA

Evening Post, Volume CVI, Issue 5, 6 July 1928, Page 8

Evening Post. FRIDAY JULY 6, 1925. NEW ZEALAND'S POLICY IN SAMOA

As the only functions of ihe Mandates Commission as defined by Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations are "to receive and examine the annual reports of the Mandatories and to advise the Council on all matters relating to the observance of the mandates," the formal publication of the Commission's report on the Samoan Administration is properly withheld until the meeting of the Council in September, when it will be received and discussed.. But these things have, a way of leaking out, and it is not surprising that in a matter of world-wide interest and importance the Jendency has proved irresistible, without even the thin disguise, of'an "It is understood" or any other qualifying clause a summary of the report was supplied by the Press Association's Geneva correspondent a week ago. In one sense it may be called a compromise report. There were, says the message, two opinions within the Commission. One favoured a still briefer report; the other desired to deal with each point raised seriatim. The result amounts to a compromise not satisfying either .party. But the compromise was really on a matter not of substance but of form. There is no trace of indecision or splitting the difference in the purport of the report. If it is not so full of fact and argument as the Royal Commission's report, one reason is that that report had cleared the way. The document in which the Mandates Commission summarises its conclusions may not run to more than a few inches, "but 't is enough, 't will serve." In substance the Mandatory Power could hardly have expected or desired a better report, and the timing is absolutely perfect. On the 26th June the Leader of the Opposition, follpwing the line of attack previously developed with discouraging results before Pakeha audiences, sought to win the sympathy of a large meeting of Maoris at Omahu. We quote two sentences from the Press Association's rep brt of his" speech:— ' The Coato* Government's administrators have violated all the principles of the Magna Carta held so dearly by the British people. .. If the Administration could not'be carried out without violence then it was better to hand Samoa back.to tho League of Nations. This speech was reported on the 27th June, and on the following day Parliament met to'hear the GovernorGeneral's speech with its inevitable references to the anxiety caused by "the disaffection of a section of the population" of Western Samoa. His Excellency's last words on the subiL ject were:— The policy of the Administration is, and always has been, to exercise the utmost possible patience consistent with the due observance of the law. On the ,29th came the summary of the report of the Mandates Commission—the tribunal to which Mr. 0. F. Nelson and his friend, Mr. H. E. Holland, had been looking for redress from the outrageous proceedings of the New Zealand Government and the "Moscow methods" with the shame of which the civilised world has been made to ring. But the report does not contain, a word about Magna Carta or the rights of man, not a word about the carnival of injustice and violence which has so appalled Mr. Holland as to make him suggest that New Zealand should plead guilty and surrender her trust. The whole fantastic structure of Mr. Nelson's imagination and Mr. Holland's morbid but not entirely disinterested sentimentality is shattered in a single sentence, and, "like the baseless fabric of a vision," "leaves not a rack behind": v The Mandates CommissionVxoport on Samoa condemns in the strongest terms Mr. 0. F. Nelson's activities, but considers that Gdneral Bichai'dson did not act with sufficient firmness in the early stages. Nothing could have been more compact and at the same time more complete. What the Labour leader applauds, or at any rate condones, the Mandates Commission condemns without qualification of any kind. What he condemns the Commission acquits entirely on the only charge that he makes. Has Mr. Holland had a word to say in condemnation of Mr. Nelson or of anything that is his? If so we have not heard it. A highly successful merchant and capitalist would in any other country have been "prima facie" anathema to Mr. Holland, but though Mr. Nelson's operations, among a people who, in the words of the Mandate clause of the Covenant, are- "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world," would reasonably have exposed him to a particularly jealous scrutiny, Mr. Holland has for some reason or other ; taken a precisely opposite course.: Everything has been presumed in favour of the capitalist and trader who had his own interests to promote, and against the Government and the Administration, whose sole j concern was to protect the natives, as they were pledged to do. Even when the interests of the natives and the traders came to a direct clash on the price of copra, the Labour leader's attitude was not changed. It cannot be saicl that the conditions under which the Samoans sold their copra to the traders were just or reasonable. Such was the finding of the Royal

Commission, yet Mr. Holland was content to sneer at the smallness of the effort made by the Administration for the protection of the native.1! from this exploitation—an effort which would of course have received .a great extension but for Mr. Nelson's successful opposition—and to postpone any practical help till the millennium by idle verbiage about "natiomalisa-, lion." It is, however, probably to the more recent phase of Mr. Nelson's activities that the severe cenisure of the Mandates Commission more particularly relates, and it is here that the complicity of Labour is particularly glaring. The finding of the Royal Commission is that there was no serious trouble in Samoa till Mr. Nelson established the Maa; that it represented "an organised arid deliberate attempt to frustrate and render abortive the activities <of the Administration," and that the Administrator was right in his opinion that the organisation of! the Mau as understood and used by tlws natives could not exist alongside of and concurrently with the administration of the country under the Mandate. ' One or other must give way. It was the opinion of the Administration and the Government that the Mau must give way. The Labour Party took the opposite view, and Mr. Holland bitterly condemns the harshness. and the violence with which the Administration acted. But all that the Mandates Commission has to say on this point is thai ■General Richardson did not act with ■sufficient firmness in the early stages. He, was not too precipitate and too violent. His only fault was that he was too long-suffering and too patient. Mr. Holland must surely amend his indictment, but whether he does or not he has covered his party with a discredit which will not be forgotten on this side of the General Election.