CONTROL OF MANDATES

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12612, 24 November 1926, Page 6

CONTROL OF MANDATES

After consultation with the Dominions holding mandates from the League of Nations, the British Government has replied to the League’s questionnaire. The reply is a courteous and firm refusal to comply with the demands of this document. This is noteworthy, as the first instance of Imperial common action. Consultation between the Imperial Dominions interested has justified itself by a good result. Practically, the reply means that the League is not governing the mandated territories, that it was never meant to govern them, and that it is quite impossible for it to govern them. The League is thus reminded of the primary object of the mandatory system. It is really a guarantee that the peoples governed under the League’s mandates shall have justice, fair play, and civilisation as far as possible under a system of government working solely in their interest. Mention of this principle carries the mind back far into the last century, to the time when the agitation ran high for the substitution of systematic, enlightened colonisation for the haphazard methods of the day which were disastrous to aboriginal inhabitants and burdensome to the colonising That agitation was one of the great philanthropic movements of history. Out of it came the systematic colonisation of New Zealand, which has had two great successes. The first is the wonderful progress of the colony in eight decades from colony to status as a sound member of the Imperial partnership just firmly sealed by the Imperial Conference. The other success is the just and sympathetic government of the Maori race by the responsible Governments of the progressing Dominion. To this successful administration of the Maori people in accordance with the principle underlying the mandatory system of the League of Nations,'New Zealand owes the mandate it holds from the League for the well-being of the Samoans and other islands of the Tacific covered by that instrument.

The successful administration of these islands is Well known to all nations, and has been fully, even handsomely, acknowledged by the League. The League’s poWer is revisory; in fact, a check on any departure from the main principle involved. The League carihdt, as the reply to the questionnaire plainly states, possibly attend to so gigantic a task as the details of mandatory administration. But being the appellate body in cases of objection by the people governed under its mandate, it is entitled to every information that is necessary to guide its appellate judgment. The reply after "common action” to the League contains the promise that in the case of any petitionising appeal from any man: dated people such information Will be supplied as a matter of course. That ought to be a final settlement of the mandate question. 1