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COMMITTEE No. 6. Political Questions. From the New Zealand point of view the most important of the subjects referred to this committee for consideration was that of mandates. The other subjects dealt with were refugees, minorities, and slavery. Mandates. This subject was brought before the committee as the result of a resolution proposed in the Assembly on the 12th September by the Norwegian delegation (Document A. 48). It was discussed by the Committee at its fifth meeting, on the morning of the 23rd September. Fairly lengthy sections of the Report on the work of the League are devoted to the subject of mandates (Document A. 6, pages 49 to 56, and A. 6 (a), pages 15 to 22), and particulars of the work of the Permanent Mandates Commission are there set out in some detail. The terms of reference to the committee, however, were quite general, and the discussion, similarly, dealt with general principles rather than with any particular mandate or any specific points dealt with in the documents I have mentioned. Samoa was not referred to in any speech, except the one which I myself delivered, and which was very fairly summarized as follows in the League Journal of the 24th September :— " Sir Thomas Wilford (New Zealand) said that all three political parties in New Zealand regarded the mandate for Samoa as a sacred trust and he was confident that, given time and patience, Samoa would be brought into no less satisfactory a condition than prevailed in New Zealand and in the Cook Islands. The inhabitants of the mandated territories were ethnologically the cousins of that Maori section of the Polynesian race, alongside of which he, as a New-Zealander, had grown up. The ' father ' of the New Zealand Parliament to-day was, in point of fact, a Maori. The progress which had thus in less than one hundred years been realized in New Zealand had within his own lifetime been repeated in the Cook Islands, where relations between the white traders and the Native communities had undergone recent remarkable improvement. In Samoa the Government was still faced with great difficulties. As would be fully explained to the Permanent Mandates Commission at its forthcoming session, much trouble had been given by passive resistance among the Natives. Referring to certain alleged contradictions between the reports of two successive Commissions of Inquiry sent by the New Zealand Government to Samoa, he pointed out that any apparent discrepancies were due to differences in the terms of reference of the two Commissions. While the second had been specifically concerned with administrative questions, evidence on such topics had rightly been excluded by the first Commission as irrelevant to its task. He desired also to observe that the financial burden of such mistakes as had occurred had fallen not upon the Samoan people, but upon the New Zealand ratepayers. New Zealand was grateful to the Permanent Mandates Commission for its recognition of the progress that had been made. She was fully conscious of the respect due to the League as the source of the mandates, and he ventured to believe that the day was not far distant when Samoa would be accounted the shining jewel amongst the mandated territories." The first speaker in the Committee discussion was the Hon. F. Brennan, M.P., Attorney-General of Australia, who complimented the Permanent Mandates Commission on the work performed by it, but emphasized the necessity for the Commission to keep within the limits prescribed by the Covenant and by the terms of the mandates, and urged that it should not concern itself unduly either with details of administration —with regard to which the Mandatory was in the best position to judge— or with considerations of a purely legal or theoretical nature. He further suggested that questions reflecting adversely on the Mandatory should not be raised without the source of the complaint being disclosed, as a guarantee of good faith and responsibility. He then analysed at some length the exact rights and duties of a Mandatory, as set out in the Covenant and in the mandate itself, and particularly emphasized the rights of the holders of " C " mandates to administer the territories entrusted to them as an integral part of their own territories, provided that the moral and material welfare and social progress of the inhabitants are adequately safeguarded. While declining to admit that the mandate gave the right to any person or authority outside Australia to pursue inquiries in detail into the administration of the law in the mandated territory, he gave the assurance that information would not be arbitrarily withheld. The principal theme of the speech made by the British delegate was that the principle of " trusteeship " definitely set out in the Covenant with regard to mandated territories, should equally be the guiding principle adopted by all nations in the administration of all colonies peopled by peoples in a backward stage of development. His speech led to some misunderstanding, particularly on the part of the Portugese delegate, who apparently thought that a proposal had been made to extend the mandate system to all such colonies ; but at a subsequent meeting the British delegate made it clear that his remarks referred only to the application of the principle of trusteeship, and that he had not advocated any actual extension of the mandate system. Of the other speeches I need only refer to the remarks of the German delegate, who stressed the necessity, from his point of view, of the Mandates Commission keeping a close watch with regard to the question of economic discrimination.

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