COLONIAL EVOLUTION

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23897, 26 August 1939, Page 21

COLONIAL EVOLUTION

When our Victorian grandfathers established self-government in the great colonies which are now dominions, says the Glasgow Herald, they were perfectly well aware that it was likely to produce in the course of time a series of independent British nations. Of course, the process of change by agreement has not ended, and can never end unless it is stopped by a universal return to methods of violence. British colonial policy, which attempts to prepare backward peoples for self-govern-ment, is bound to produce, as time goes on, new dominions in Africa, Asia and perhaps the West Indies. Nor can this sort of development be confined to the British Empire. In the nature of things the political arrangement by which a handful of European countries control the greater part of the tropics and the southern hemisphere cannot last for ever In should be reckoned one of Britain’s greatest historical achievements that she has shown a way of change which allows new "irionc to prise and take their place in the world without tearing interna oional society to pieces in the process.