MR HOLLAND ON SAMOA.

Evening Star, Issue 19773, 25 January 1928, Page 6

MR HOLLAND ON SAMOA.

Mr Coatks’s statement on the troubles in Samoa was inadequate lor ensuring conviction that the Government has acted there with the best wisdom and statesmanship. Mr Holland, in his reply to it, performs the astonishing feat of ignoring the Royal Commission’s report practically altogether. He has his own theories, of the causes of the dissatisfaction in Samoa, which he sets forth as if the Commission had never existed. First among the provocations to unrest lie places the manner of appointment and the functions of faipules, and second the “flagrant dishonoring of promises made by the New Zealand Government, including Sir James Parr’s promise that the Samoans would be given representation in the Legislative Council.” The Commission reported, after the most careful and impartial investigation, that the faipules were appointed in a quite reasonable fashion, and that no complaint was made by natives on this score till the Citizens’ Committee showed its strong hostility to the Administration in October, 192 G. Wo have no memory of the alleged promise of Sir James Parr which is cited, but the Commission found that the Samoans could work better in their own assembly, the Fono of Faipules, and that it would be a mistake to include them in the Legislative Council. As to complaints which the Labor leader makes of the “ numerous punishments inflicted on Samoans during the past several years without any form of trial in a court of justice,” the Commission found that these wore not punishments, but merely precautionary measures to prevent disorders, adopted in each case after reasonable inquiry, and imposing very little hardship upon the objects of them. They were in a different position plainly from the deportations of white men, who must be judged to be something more than children when the Administration has to deal with them, and who are subjected to much harsher penalties when, irrespective of the businesses they maybe carrying on, they are banished beyond the territory of Samoa. Another injury- “ which rankles in the Samoan mind,” according to Mr Holland, is the non-observance of a promise given by the chairman of the Parliamentary Committee that, when its report was concluded, the report and evidence would both be made public. The Royal Commission took over the evidence of this committee and it did not use it, preferring its own evidence, taken on the spot, to that taken in Wellington, and the report of the Parliamentary Committee became, therefore, a quite subordinate document. The only offence which it is suggested that Mr Nelson and his friends have been guilty of, according to Mr Holland, is that of “constitutional opposition” to tho Administration. If their influence was used to persuade the natives not to destroy pests or comply with other regulations, and generally to bring the work of the Administration practically to a standstill, that would be going far beyond the limits of “constitutional opposition.” Mr Holland does an injustice to Mr Coates when he quotes him as saying that “a stronger course” is to bo taken in Samoa, as if that were the Government’s only policy for the future. The Prime Minister referred also to its intention to “put in hand those conciliatory methods which we believe will ultimately prove successful.” The real question is whether the necessity for such an extreme procedure as deportation, with or without trial, might not have been avoided if those methods had been tried before, and applied to Europeans as well ns natives.