DOMINION AND SAMOA

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 53, Issue 3813, 25 September 1936, Page 2

DOMINION AND SAMOA

NEW DEVELOPMENTS. OPINION OF “THE TIMES.” New Zealand and her foster-child have had many differences of opinion during the last fifteen years, wrote “The Times” editorially recently. Samoa is attractive but self-willed, a true child of the age; New Zealand has at times seemed perplexed and over-anxious. Why, she asked, could not the Samoans settle down like their Maori cousins? But a new chapter in the story seems to have been opened by the New Zealand mission of good will which returned to WeM lington recently. The members, led by Mr. Langstone, the Minister of Lands, were in Samoa barely a month. In that time they seem to have cleared away most of the understandings of many years. Let bygones be bygones, they said in effect to the natives; and they started the welcome process by promising the repeal of all restrictive laws which New Zealand felt compelled to pass five or six years ago at a time when unrest was growing. Mr. Langstone announced that the Government had already agreed that the native agitators should no longer be banished, that the internal passport system would be abolished, that the Mau (the strong native organisation, at one time actively Sinn Feinn) would no longer be held seditious, and that nothing more would be said about the old-standing arrears in tax. These are certainly numerous concessions, and it is hardly surprising to learn that the mission left Samoa with' the natives’ blessing on their heads. Samoa, in all fairness, has had little chance to settle down peacefully and industriously. The st#ry of the last seventy or eighty years is a story of quick changes. Germany, the United States, and Great Britain were the first rivals for the islands, which are a group in many ways like the Western Isles of Scotland, mountainous and thinly populated, but infinitely more fertile. In 1900 Germany took the lion’s share and the United States took the rest. A Mandated Territory. During the war a New Zealand expeditionary force occupied the German part, and after the war this, section (which is Western Samoa) was made a mandated territory under New Zealand. Settlers complained that few of the natives could be depended on to work steadily; and gradually Chinese and negroid labour was imported to exploit the natural riches of copra, cocoa and rubber. The Samoans, quickly recovering their energy, started a campaign for home rule. New Zealand hesitated at first in meeting the situation; then the natives were aroused by reports that a discipline almost military in character was to be imposed. Since - some short and fierce riots in 1930, however, there has been a well-kept truce. The mission’s work can be the start of making the truce a peace, and no recommendation will give the natives greater hope for the future than that which proposes that the number of coolie workers will be reduced year by year. Mr. Langstone is reported to have said that he believes that the Samoans will easily be enabled to become industrial workers. The task may not be so easy as all that; nor can it be onesided. The New Zealand Government have wiped the slate clean. It is for the Samoan leaders now to decide how fully the opportunity is to be grasped, and how fully they will co-operate with New Zealand in her “ultimate aim of making Samoa a self-supporting territory.”