New Zealand And Her

Mandate.

[To the Editor ] Sir, —Again I have to thank you for your courtesy in printing, in full, my somewhat lengthy letter of July 7 and also for correct ing the mistaken idea that I am owner of the “N.Z. Samoa Guardian” and responsible for all its contents, though your use of the possessive pronoun in your footnote now implies that its editor is mine, anyhow.

I do not wish to appear contumacious or determined to have the last word, but I must, reluctantly, again protest at the wrongful im plications in your August footnote.

I am not dominated by “hatred of New Zea land” and never have been. After five years’ compulsory exile here I find much to like and admire in the country, and have met innumer able friends of Samoa, whom I have the greatest respect for. But I certainly hate cruelty and oppression and the sufferings of my people and my blood relations in Samoa have filled me with the greatest contempt for those responsible.

I have no option but to face the facts as I see them, and one fact is that if New Zealand has been carrying out the terms of the Man date, which Versailles declares “a sacred trust of civilisation” and “the tutelage of a people unable to stand alone in the stress of modern world conditions,” then words have lost their meaning, and a policy of coercion, oppression, degradation, massacre, and war on a helpless people has become the spirit of “sacred trus teeship” and of Geneva.

But even the League of Nations has rebuked

the New Zealand Government for its conduct of the Mandate on more than one occasion, as a perusal of the findings of the Permanent Man dates Commission will disclose, and the report of the Verschaffelt-Park-Berendsen Inquiry was a tremendous revelation of maladministration, which shocked the League of Nations, especially when the New Zealand Government’s own public servants told it the administration of the Man date “was in no way creditable to New Zea land.” Nor has it been since that scathing exposure.

You also suggest “that the only way out of the present impasse is by a proper approach by the Mau to the New Zealand Government.”

I enclose a copy of such an approach, which the Mau made on August 31. together with the amazing reply of General Hart, the Adminis trator. In the face of this gesture by the administrative head towards a national organ isation representing 95 per cent, of the Samoan people, I presume you will no longer think much of your “only way of the present im passe.”

I am, etc..

O. F. Nelson.

Auckland, Sept. 14, 1932.

The exhibit of Fiji butter displayed at the recent Winter Exhibition in Auckland was received with much in terest. In the oversea butter section, the Fiji “Dove” brand was the only sample to be placed in the first grade.