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Samoa Under the Sailing Gods

I

I

Soon after the Great War the German colonies were apportioned among the victorious Allies. But their appropriation hardly according with one of President Wilson's "Fourteen Points," the Peace Conference came near to an impasse over the problem. It was then—with the formula of "Call them Mandates!"—that the new-born League of Nations was found to provide a convenient stalking-horse. For thus it made its debut. And the various territories were apportioned among the victors exactly as they would have been in any case; but with this difference, that they were farmed out, ostensibly, each under a League of Nations mandate, in the spirit of a "sacred trust."

The United States of America, true to her traditional, if recent, idealism, wanted none of them; and she repudiated immediately, I know not why, the infant League. But for this she might, as mistress of the Eastern Samoa Islands, have put in a strong claim to the western part of that group. So Western Samoa—by virtue of possession and propinquity, and because it had long been desired and was now demanded (vide The Intimate Papers of Colonel House), and since America was out of the running it was practicable—fell to New Zealand. And the valuable plantations belonging to the German Firm, then in full bearing, with other ex-enemy property, formed part of the New Zealand war reparations; going first by the name of "The Crown," and more recently by the designation of "The Reparation, Estates."

It had been specified by the British Government in August 1914, I should explain, that the New Zealand occupation of Samoa did not necessarily entail annexation, and that the territory must be available for purposes of bargaining at the Peace Conference.

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Thus, officially, by the Treaty of Versailles—June 28,1919—the Mandate for the future government of Western Samoa was offered to and accepted by New Zealand. The actual text of the Mandate itself is dated Geneva, December 17, 1920. But one thing strikes me strangely about this "Mandate"—in which, of course, it would seem I must be wrong; but in which I am confident that I am not—that what is here described as "the former German colony of Samoa" was, in point of fact, a mere Protectorate.