SAMOA.

Evening Star, Issue 19801, 27 February 1928, Page 6

SAMOA.

Mu Holland becomes more and more difficult to follow ifi his comments on the Samoan situation. In his contributions to polemics he is accustomed to reason logically if only ono could grant tho premises of his argument, but in his latest animadversions on the arrests of the Man police force logic goes entirely by the board. “ The action of tho Government in declaring the Man an illegal organisation,” he has said, “ would prove to bo exceedingly illadvised in view of tho fact that within the past few days the Administrator had been seeking a conference with the Man. Representatives of the natives would find it very hard to understand why the Government one day considered their organisation worthy of official recognition and next day proclaimed it seditious and unlawful, and dragged its representatives off to prison.” There was nothing inconsistent in that procedure. It is quite evident that the Government had no intention to proscribe or to punish tho Man if it could persuade it to mend its ways. With that object the Administrator did his best, beginning as long as three weeks ago, to arrange a meeting between tho Mau Committee and tho Faipules, and also a conicrcnco with himself, to seo whether an understanding could not bo arrived at. In so doing ho carried the conciliation recommended by Mr Holland as tho proper policy of the Government to tho furthest possible point. It was tho Mau leaders who refused repeatedly to attend either conference or to have anything to do with edneiliation. It was the Mau police by whom big sticks” were used to prevent Samoans from buying New Zealand goods. No alternative was then lelt to tho Administration but to declare the Mau to be what the Royal Commission, on_ sufficient evidence, had pronounced it—a seditious organisation—and to forbid the wearing of its uniform by its sellconstituted police. • There cannot be two police forces in nn island nine by .seven— one to enforce the law and another, ten times as laigc, to m-cvcnt its enforcement and to compel boycotts with the aid of the big stick. If Mr Holland is not “ trying to make party capital ” out of tho Samoan position it is hard to imagine what he is trying to do. Possibly he is only following a “kink’’ of his character, which persuades him that in any difference of his nation with either brown or yellow skins the brown or yellow skins must be in tho right and his nation wholly wrong. Great Britain was entirely and wickedly wrong when it took steps to prevent tho massacre of British and other nationals in Shanghai, and New Zealand can only be “mo. .ng from madness to madness ” when it decides that there cannot be two organised. authorities working against each other in Samoa. If Mr Holland wore Prime Minister of New Zealand, and tho Welfare League, for exampleset np a police force of its own to aid it in the active thwarting of his Government, would he regard that as ’ constitutional opposition,” the term by which lie has described in the past tho operations ol the (Man, and would still leave us to understand as expressing his view of its activities The analogy is not fanciful, because Mr Holland refuses to consider Samoa in the light of foreign—extra New Zealand—territory. Wo imagine that that police force would be very quickly suppressed by Mr Holland. He would expect the leader of any constitutional Opposition to support him in suppressing it, an ' the law which lie would expect to apply to New Zealand should hold good for him in his position of leader of this country’s Opposition, so far as Samoa is concerned. Samoa must bo a difficult charge for any G .vrnnient that is entrusted with the mandate of it, and if Mr Holland’s extravagances are repeated in Samoa, where he is less known than here, they can only increase the difficulties ol the C.-vernment there, which every New Zealander should desire to see reduced to the smallest proportions.