COLONIES PROBLEM.

Manawatu Standard, Volume LVII, Issue 72, 24 February 1937, Page 9

COLONIES PROBLEM.

INDEPENDENT STATE SUGGESTION. Sir John Harris, who lived for several years in tropical Africa as a missionary, in an article in the Manchester Guardian urges that the colonial question should be approached from the idea of the old Congo Basin convention.

The Manchester Guardian, in an editorial, comments: “If stress is put on the German claims, then the scheme which was defined by the Berlin Conference in 18-85, under the chairmanship of Prince von Bismarck, might prove a better starting place than the mandatory system which, in German eyes, is linked with the hated Versailles system. Statesmen who are nervous of the whole subject of revision might be persuaded by that clause of the Convention of St. Germain in which the bones of the Berlin Act were buried and which provides for a conference to discuss such modifications as experience may have shown necessary after 10 years. Actually 10 years have now been succeeded by another eight years, but no conference has been called. “For those whose chief concern is the economic side, the ideals of the Berlin Act were in some ways even in advance of the mandatory system. Free trade and an open door under the mandatory clauses of the Versailles Treaty are subject to certain definite limitations, but under the Berlin Act, trade was as free as the words alone could ensure over an immense area, for it was based on the Congo Independent State, now Belgian Congo, which was the first attempt at an international ■ State. “An alliance between the principles of the Berlin Act and those of the mandate system, as proposed by Sir John Harris, might conveniently lead to any other scheme Which has been suggested.” In 1919, at the close of the Great War, the principles of the Berlin Act of 1885 were, in the absence of Austria and Germany, reaffirmed in the convention of St. Germain for a years.