Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 1919. ADMINISTRATION OF SAMOA

Evening Post, Volume XCVII, Issue 130, 4 June 1919, Page 6

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, JUNE 4, 1919. ADMINISTRATION OF SAMOA

Though New Zealand has had charge of German Samoa for nearly five years, it is quite impossible for anybody who has not had the opportunity of acquiring official or local knowledgo which' is not open to the public to pass judgment with any confidence on the merits of the administration. Scraps of information reach -us from time to time in official reports and in unofficial charges, which in due course are officially denied, but there has been no such full information or free discussion as to enable the conscientious inquirer to feel that he is really getting at the bedrock facts. Themutilated condition in which, even after the acceptance by our representatives at the Peace Conference ol a .-nandate for Samoa, a letter from a Samoan planter on labour conditions in the islands reached tho Auckland Star, suggests that the military censorship, which was proper and "necessary before the Armistice, is now being used lo suppress information which the people of New Zealand have just as much right to know as the military rulers of Samoa or tho civil authorities here. It is a strange commentary upon the open diplomacy and "all the cards on the table" era, at which we are supposed to have arrived, that New Zealand should be saddled with an entirely unforeseen'and undesired responsi- ; bility for Samoa without knowing the reason why, and that while the terms of the mandate are being settled she should be kept in ignorance of essential facts by the misguided decrees of a belated censorship. The' discussion which our London correspondent reported yesterday on the paper read by Mr. G H. Scholefield before the Royal Colonial Institute serves at least to remind us that our administration of Samoa has not established • the millennium there, and that the mandate will confront us with some thorny problems. Captain , Annandale, who lived in the group for several years under the Germans, does not say that their administration was, on the whole, preferable to our own, but his critici.sm plainly implies that in one important respect it was decidedly superior. The New Zealand Administration (said Captain Annandale) had interfered with tho. labour arrangements of the planters in such a .way as to. seriously impair their prosperity, and he" earnestly hoped that tho British Government, and not the New Zealand Government, would be given control of the islands. To what extent, if any, Captain Annandale's testimony may be reasonably subject to discount on account of a bias of interest or sympathy in favour of the planters, we ar_ unable to say.' But it is quite clear, not only from local testimony, which may be open to this exception, but from the .brief references to the subject which have been made from time to time by Sir James Allen, that thero has been a serious shortage of labour under our administration, and that the cause, or one of the causes, has been a change in the conditions of indenturing. The veto on the further importation of coloured labour and the reduction of the renewal period to six months wero both ascribed by the Acting Premier to the direct instructions of the Imperial Government, and he also said that it was at tho instance of our own Government that an extension of the renewal term to two years had been made. • But though Sir William Macgregor, who is reputed to know all that there is to be known about the Pacific, was in the chair, and there were doubtless other, experts present, this point does not seem to have been put before the meeting. 1 Sir Gilbert Parker, whom our correspondent reports to havo made short work of Captain Annandale's complaint, caunot be said to have done so in a very satisfactory way. "It was," he said, "a very good principle that people who could manage their own country were the best people to be entrusted with tho management of dependencies." But jjoij .ftilil.ioa <*i Uiia kind, thgiiflli, if suit" ably declaimed, they may sound well from

the platform, realty do not holp matters j much, and this particular generality entirely fails to touch the one point that has troubled the people of this country. The British people surely satisfy Sir Gilbert Parker's test as well as our own people. They have not entirely failed in the management of their own affairs, and from long experience they havo acquired a skill in the government of dependencies to which New Zealand can make no pretence. Why, then, is New Zealand to have the mandate instead of Britain? Here again Sir William Macgregor and the rest of the company were evidently ignorant of the official explanation which has been sent to this country from Paris. After our delegates at the Conference had incurred a good deal of criticism on the assumption that they had preferred a New Zealand to a British mandate, we were told, in a manner which suggested that we ought to have.known it before, that a mandate to Britain was out of the question, and that New Zealand had taken on the contract as the only alternative to foreign control. No reason was given for . the disqualification of the Mother Country, but on such authority it had, of course, to be accepted as a fact. That Captain Annandale's plea for a British mandate was hot met with what would have been a conclusive answer shows that London, at the date of the debate on Mr. Scholefield's paper, knew no more about this fundamental point than New Zealand did. Such remarkable ignorance deepens the mystery which Mr. Massey in part elucidated by*l the message despatched from Paris by his official chronicler a few days ljtter. Neither in Samoa nor in Paris has the day of open diplomacy fully dawned, and we must be content with guesswork to fill up the wide gaps in our knowledge.