NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXIII, Issue 19383, 19 July 1926, Page 8

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

BRAZIL AND THE LEAGUE. Brazil's opposition to the election of Germany to a permanent seat on the League of Nations Council unless she received a similar honour is explained in the Fortnightly Review by Mr. Dudley Heathcote. He says that Brazil bases her claim on the fact, that her country is territorially one of the largest in the world (three and a-half million square miles), her resources are immense, if largely untapped, and her population well over thirty-five millions; that is to say, equal to that of the rest of South America. She declares that from the beginning of the League's existence she has protested against the injustice done to America in the treatment of old and new countries and points out 'that on her own continent there are as many as twenty nations without a single permanent seat in the council. Her position, in short, is that to include a fourth European nation as permanent member of a council which has only one non-European member, Japan, is to subordinate world policy to a purely regional or Continental agreement, and that she must consequently continue to uphold her just claim, confident that sooner or later the league will begin to realise that the .co-operation of American nations in the great task of international concord is indispensable.

THE CIVILISING OF KENYA. An effective answer to criticism of British Government in Kenya Colony was made by Lord Cranworth, in an address to the Royal Colonial Institute. He said that until almost the end of the last century, what is now called KenyanColony was a land of savagery and cruelty, occupied largely by huge herds of game, themselves dominated by carnivora, and inhabited by natives of the most primitive type dominated in their turn by those human beasts of prey, the Masai. This tribe of magnificent warriors, numbering less than 100,000, kept ten times their own number of other indigenous tribes, more intelligent and infinitely more useful, skulking in the edge of forest and cowering in the bush. Into this land of darkness crept the thin Steel line of the railway; and with its advance, so did the whole brutal dominance of the Masai tribe fade away The railway started in 1896, and 1898 saw the last big scale Masai raid. Under British administration, the Masai have been allotted a territory, vast n proportion to their numbers, containing much of the best grazing in the Colony, and considerable sums have been spent in increasing the water supply. All those previously subservient tribes are to-dav in possession of bounds far wider than ever they dared to touch formerly. No longer living under the shadow of apprehension they cultivate vast stretches of the best land in the Colony. To the white population have been allotted considerable areas, for their exclusive settlement, in the high, healthy and amazingly fertile tableland. Save for a few wanderers, the whole of this area was not only completely bare of human habitation at the advent of British rule, and would be so to-day had the country remained under its savage domination. The numbers of white settlers have grown from approximately 500, 20 years ago, to somewhere in the neighbourhood of 18,000 to-day. After innumerable experiments and failures, certain definite products and crops—cattle, sheep, maize, coffee, sisal, and perhaps wheatseem marked out as the main, though by no means only, agricultural industries.

THE FUTURE OF EAST AFRICA. Lord Cranworth stated that the area available for white settlement in Kenya is limited, his own opinion being that in 20 years the white population will not exceed 100.000. unless minerals in unexpected quantities should be discovered. "Kenya cannot stand alone," he said. "Her future i- bound up with that of her neighbours—Uganda, Tanganyika, and Nyassaland, certainly; Northern Rhodesia and the Sudan, probably. Large portions of these spacious territories are suitable for white colonisation. They contain within their broad bounds almost every form of mineral and agricultural wealth. They possess splendid ports, great waterways, fine forests, and, not least, indigenous populations, varying in value, of course, but much of them virile and intelligent, and who, under our guidance, will march along the road of progress at an ever-increasing pace. 1 picture to myself in 30 years' time a great confederacy of States, its area punctuated wherever possible with prosperous white settlements maintaining a high standard of life, and numbering in the aggregate not less than half a million. Alongside and all around a native population, free and prosperous, some cultivating land for themselves, others working for, and learning from, their white neighbours. Each State will have its own local Government; above them will be the Federal Parliament, supreme in the capital, and for this proud position Nairobi seems marked out. It is a -matter of common knowledge that German immigration is largely on the increase, and flattering though this may be to our reputation for fair dealing, it would not be satisfactory were the small resident British population to be submerged. For, after all, it is under the British flag, and under the guidance of the British race, that native peoples progress most surely and advanco most peacefully toward prosperity, self-expression, and true citizenship."