The Sun TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1928. A FIRM HAND IN SAMOA

Sun (Auckland), Volume I, Issue 260, 24 January 1928, Page 8

The Sun TUESDAY, JANUARY 24, 1928. A FIRM HAND IN SAMOA

THE pith of the Prime Minister’s explanatory statement on the causes of unrest in Western Samoa and the drastic action of the mandatory Government in deporting the principal agitators is its unswerving insistence on the argument that the Administration- can do no wrong. A blameless record is claimed for one side, while the other is indicted for mischievous activities, selfish commercial greed, and covert acts of unpatriotic seoundrelism. Such argument, as given with all the weight of authority and that legal wisdom which fortifies State administrators in controversy, may satisfy political partisans and inspire them to fulsome praise of the Administration, but it will not convince all observers as to the lack of blamelessness on the part of the authorities. It is at least reasonable to assume that somewhere in the island ferment there must he an official provocative cause of the disturbance. Beyond doubt, the Government’s statement is impressive, but it would have been hailed with a livelier satisfaction had it been accompanied by a guarantee that the rigorous corrective policy of the Administration had made an end to the serious trouble in Western Samoa. There is not anything like such a guarantee in the careful statement. There is only a meagre assurance, based more on hope than on actual fact, that the Government’s drastic action in deporting the most notorious agitators will enable the authorities to achieve peacefully and gradually their object, which, as everybody knows and acknowledges without any qualification whatever, is absolutely nothing more than to attain and maintain the best possible system of good government with moral and material progress for a native race. But against that hopeful assurance must be placed the ugly comment of the principal deportee, the Hon. O. P. Nelson, to an interviewer at Auckland yesterday—“"We have been peacemakers all, along. Now it is for General Richardson to keep order if he can.” There is enough in that observation to make it an oblique threat of even more serious unrest in the disturbed territory. If this should be the immediate prospect, there will be no occasion for bestowing enthusiastic praise on the Government for its so-called policy of patience, forbearance and conciliation. It may have seemed unassailable wisdom in Samoa to deport the trio of shrewd agitators, not, mark you, as- a penalty or punishment for any wrong-doing, but as a preventive measure to facilitate the good government of the territory, but it should not have been overlooked that, under different tactics on the part of the Administration, their persuasive influence for mischief among the natives, might possibly have been exercised in the opposite direction. That possibility has been removed in circumstances which probably, if not almost v certainly, will convince the natives of Western Samoa that they have been ruthlessly deprived of sympathetic advisers. Hence the prospect of even worse trouble. It is true that administrators of territories, whose native inhabitants are “not yet able to stand by themselves,” must necessarily be given expansive powers of correction and even coercion, but wise administrators avoid making use of them save in very exceptional circumstances. The Government doubtless believes that the situation in Samoa was dangerous enough to warrant drastic action which would not be tolerated in more British communities, but it has yet to prove the wisdom of its policy. It is to be hoped that the natives of Western Samoa will accept the Government’s good intentions and co-operate with the Administration in repairing the evil effects of agitation and in establishing peaceful and progressive government.