BRITISH COLONIES.

Evening Star, Issue 25426, 6 March 1945, Page 4

BRITISH COLONIES.

A self-constituted and unofficial " British Commonwealth Relations Conlference " has decided that Great Britain and the dominions have not the resources to develop after the war all their colonies. It wants to call in outside assistance, particularly from America. From the brief terms of the cable message it is not clear what is meant by this suggestion. Following the precedent of the late mandate system under' Geneva's auspices there may be a case for some sort of supervisory and consultative association of other nations with the British Commonwealth, such as Field-Marshal Smuts has suggested, for the control of Britain's colonies and others. If the proposal means, however, that British colonies shall be shared out or parted with to relieve Great Britain oif present costs and responsibilities it is not likely to be listened to for a moment. At the beginning, of the war, when the United States, then neutral, leased to the Empire certain over-age destroyers, invaluable at the moment, unofficial suggestions were made from across tho Atlantic that they should be paid for by the transfer of certain West Indian islands to America. The principle was reaffirmed then which had been proclaimed before, that British ' colonies were not for sale, and there is not the slightest doubt but' that that principle still holds. Even while she has been fighting for _ her life Great Britain has spent appreciable sums in developing the welfare df her colonies, and she will not shrink from their future cost. , The colonies have been a reproach to some super-sensitive Britishers because some of them were got by wars. A very superficial case, usually, was sufficient for the critics. Professor W. K. Hancock has written: "Why did they not recognise the immense differenco between the Italian conquest of Abyssinia and the British conquest of Nigeria—the one achieved brutally by armies of scores of thousands of men, the other achieved almost bloodlessly by a tfew hundreds? Is it not plain that the people of Nigeria must have been consenting parties to Lugard's socalled conquest ? Or arc we to believe that Lugard and Graziani are birds of the same feather?" What is more to tho point now is that for a long time past British colonies have been administered with two objects—improvement of the conditions of backward peoples and their gradual development towards the self-government which dominions already possess. After a visit which he has made there Mr Beverley Nichols has said of India that, after all. Britain has given her law. which is not olf the strong; peace, which is not of the desert, and, in the final judgment, liberty; and so it has been with the colonies. For them tho war has been a time not of neglect, but of advance. Constitutions _ have been made more liberal in Trinidad, British Guiana, and Jamaica; Malta is to be self-ruling again in internal affairs; negotiations are pending for an extension of self-government in Ceylon. And all the time, the work of bridging the ford, draining the fen, and guarding against malaria goes on. One of the foremost of British colonial administrators, Sir Frank Stockdale. has just been given the_ mission of travelling round the colonies collecting and weighing plans from men on tho spot for bettering their conditions. And, in return, it is true that, as the 'Sunday Express' has said. tho colonies" are an asset to the Empire. Tliey have been that in more ways than by the troops which many of them have sent to unhealthy campaigns, and they will be a greater asset in the future.