CLAIM AND SHADOW.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIII, Issue 9064, 3 February 1908, Page 6

CLAIM AND SHADOW.

The London correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald discusses the inability of the Colonial Office officials to look at things from the colonial point of view A series of articles appeared recently in the Herald, in which the history of the South Sea settlements was ftraced, with special reference to the dilatory methods of the Home Government. Apparently some of the officials in the Colonial Office have been giving their [views on these articles to the London correpsondent, who has come to the,conclusion that “the system which gives any definite power of control to a body of officials *so remote from the cause at issue, to say nothing of the atmosphere of traditional procedure which is native to those officials, is faulty from its very base. ’ ’ Personally the officials! are little to blame. The correspondent finds them to be quite different from what many colonials believe them to he —“a set of hide-hound, dry-as-dust"Oivil Servants, shut up in the comfortable but limited confines of a Government office, and taking the cackle of official gossip for the murmur of the Empire. ’ ’ On the contrary, they are courteous and often cultured gentlemen—many of them men of great ability and no inconsiderable knowledge of the world — unsparing of pains to get at the truth and do what is right. But, as one of them said, the partnership of an old country and a new one is full of difficulties. The Colonial Office is a brake on colonial impulsiveness. The Australian goes to Downing Street, not only confident of thQ . justice of his claim, but almost angry at the idea of opposition. He is met by an official who points imperturably to the claims of this and that nation. “Yes, that is quite all right fjom the Ausfcralian point of view,” is their answer to most of the com‘pMots in the Herald articles, “but what'ab’&sA the rights of this Frenchman here, or that German there?” The Australian holds-..that neither Frenchman nor Germaii [more than a shadow of a right. Brat the Colonial Office tradition respects that shadow, and tbe great distance between claim and shadow and administration makes it difficult to estimate properly the relative proportions of shadow and claim. The correspondent thinks that unless the new Dominion Department means drastic reform', there will he even greater friction in the future.