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Samoa Under the Sailing Gods

VIII

VIII

In the Samoa Times of December 4, 1925, may be found a reprint from a New Zealand newspaper:

"Dr. S. M. Lambert, an expert on tropical diseases and a medical officer of the famous Rockefeller Foundation of New York, was a passenger by the Tahiti which arrived in Wellington to-day en route to San Francisco. He speaks of the splendid work done by the medical staff in Samoa, upon which he has reported to the League of Nations…. There is nothing com-page 180parable with this splendid medical and administrative work in the Pacific. It is a justification for New Zealand asking for almost anything it wants in the South Pacific."

About this time propaganda was being put out to bring Fiji also under New Zealand.

Speaking of the west of Savaii—my own district—I can affirm that, barring occasional campaigns to eliminate hook-worm and yaws, the Samoans had practically no medical attention. But, none the less, they had to pay a special medical tax of a pound a year over and above the poll-tax, which amounted to about another pound.

In the Samoa Times of December 17, 1926, with regard to a different matter, we learn that "the Governor of American Samoa reported the incident to the President of the Rockefeller Foundation, and requested that, if Dr. Lambert made the statements attributed to him, he be impressed with the gross impropriety of his conduct, as the wild assertions published did very great injustice to the people of American Samoa." This stricture might equally well have been applied to Dr. Lambert and the western part of the Samoa group. His reply was decidedly equivocal.