MANDATE TERRITORY

Dominion, Volume 21, Issue 128, 28 February 1928, Page 6

MANDATE TERRITORY

THE POSITION DEFINED HELPING BACKWARD RACES Referring to mandates in the course of his lecture at the Concert Chamber last night, Mr. J. V. Wilson, of the Geneva Secretariat, said that he would give no opinion on the present situation at Samoa. Moreover, as the Mandates Commission at Geneva had decided to await the report of tho Koya! Commission before examining the matter there was no information to give from tiie League point of view. As regards the Mandate system in general, he said, the chief thing to note was that the Mandatory Powers accepted tho principle that they were trustees for the welfare of the people whom they governed, and, in particular, were bound to prohibit certain abuses which had sometimes marred colonial administration in the past, for instance, the trade in slaves, liquor and arms. The Mandatory Powers submitted each year to the League a report and a Standing Committee —tho Permanent Mandates Commission—had been appointed to examine these reports and to advise the Council on all matters pertaining to Mandates. It was then for the Council to make to the Mandatory Powers, with whom resided the actual government of the territories, sucli recommendations as if thought fit. The idea behind the system was that a country having a Mandate would be moved by the responsibility which it owed to the League to govern in the interests of the natives of the territory, rather than in its own interests. On tho whole the fads had not invalidated this theory, and to lake tho example of New Zealand alone it was clear that the great interest which the present difficulties had aroused, keen though it would have been in any case, was increased by the feeling which all parties bad that the country was responsible for the Mandate to the League of Nations, and not to itself only.