its minutes were published in order "to secure the assistance of public opinion in the moral control incumbent upon the Commission." It was the practice of the mandatory powers to communicate the minutes of the Commission to their officials in the mandated territories. A British White Paper in 1929 drew attention to the importance of publicity as a factor in the mandates system. The standards of administration imposed by the Covenant and mandates were no higher, it declared, than those which His Majesty's Government had imposed on itself. "The new factor introduced by the mandates system is that the administration of backward areas . . . is to a greater extent than previously brought under public scrutiny." 36 Thus the British Government, in response to a suggestion from the Commission and Council, asked the Secretary General to supply for the use of His Majesty's Government and for distribution to officers in mandated territories, fifty copies of all reports and minutes of proceedings, as well as the Commission's reports to the Council and resolutions of the Council.37 Other mandatory powers also made similar requests. Subsequent annual reports indicated that the minutes were in fact being seen by the officials in the territories. "Publicity breeds publicity," comments a journalist who studied the African mandates just before the war. "Starting at the top, it spreads a shiver of self-examination through the administrative system." 38 As Lord Hailey pointed out, "only those who have had experience in the internal working of an official administration, in circumstances where there is no organization of public opinion, can appreciate the strength of the influence which can be exerted by publicity of the nature of that involved in the proceedings of the Commission and Council." 39 Yet it may be noted that no publicity during the life of the Commission approached in intensity that given by a free press and national parliaments to the scandals of the Congo or the Amazon before the first World War, or even the Denshawai incident in Egypt.* In an autocratic system, where free publicity is not possible, no mandate or trusteeship system could operate. 36 Great Britain, Report of the Commission on Closer Union of the Dependencies in Eastern and Central Africa; Presented by the Secretary of State for the Colonies to Parliament by Command of His Majesty, January, 1929, Cmd. 3234 (London, 1929), pp. 34-35 37 Letter of Foreign Office, L.N. Document C.20.1926.VI.; C.P.M. 356, Official Journal, 1926, pp. 374-75. 38 Steer, op. cit., p. 30. 39 Hailey, African Survey, op. cit., p. 219. 40 Cf. Leonard S. Woolf, Barbarians; Within and Without (New York: Har court, Brace and Company [1939]). CHAPTER XIV THE LEAGUE, AFRICA, AND THE MANDATES I. TERRITORIAL TRUSTEESHIP, AFRICAN REGIONALISM, AND As we have seen in Part I, comparisons of mandate with non-mandate administration of dependencies are most difficult to make and of questionable value. The same kind of tangled issues are involved in any attempt to judge the significance of the mandate system for Africa as a whole. The real impact of the mandate system on the seven mandated territories themselves is difficult enough to assess; but when we try to proceed beyond this to a judgment of the influence of the system on the rest of dependent Africa we enter into still more debatable ground. For one thing, there were potent influences at work in the mandated territories themselves that came from sources quite outside the mandate system. These other influences were partly national in origin and partly international. The latter form the main subject of this chapter. But we cannot pass by without mentioning the highly important national, or rather "colonial," influences on the welfare and wealth of the peoples in the mandated territories. These influences came from the fact that the mandates were in no sense isolated territories but shared the advantages of services and expenditures provided by the mandatories-Britain, Belgium, France, and South Africa-for their own colonies. Thus, in the case of Britain, the mandates had the advantage of the Colonial Secretary's specialized corps of expert advisers "on agriculture, colonial accounts, economics and finance, education, health and medicine, labour problems and law." Among the specialized bodies dealing with particular aspects were the Colonial Advisory Council of Agriculture and Animal Health; the Colonial Development Advisory Committee; the Colonial Advisory Medical Committee; committees of the Economic Advisory Council dealing with such matters as nutrition in the colonies, tsetse fly, locust control; the committees of the Imperial 1 Hailey, African Survey, op. cit., p. 161. Forestry Institute; the Imperial College of Tropical Agriculture, and a number of others.2 The Mandates Commission at its last session noted with appreciation references made in the annual report for Tanganyika for 1938, to the sharing by the territory in a whole series of financial grants made from the Colonial Development Fund, established in 1929 to assist colonies. and mandates in the development of agriculture and industry.3 Among the free grants shown in the report as approved were: Grants on a far greater scale were made possible by the Colonial Welfare and Development Act of 1940, passed by the British Parliament as the German army swept towards the Channel in May of that year. Appropriations under the act provided for the expenditure in colonies and mandated territories of £5,000,000 annually for ten years. A new act of 1946 provided for an expenditure of £120,000,000 over ten years, a proportionate part of which will go to the mandates. No one who watched at Geneva the Fourth (Budgetary) Committee of the Assembly at work year after year could have conceived of it being happy about providing for similar expenditures in League administered mandates in Africa if they had been proposed. In addition to grants from the Colonial Development Fund, still greater sums have been given as "grants in aid" to British colonies and mandated territories. The total from 1921 to 1943 was calculated recently at $152,000,000, or about 4 per cent of the total colonial revenues for that period. The figures may be compared with the grand total of all 2 Ibid. 3 P.M.C. Min. XXXVII (1939), pp. 30-47. * Great Britain, Colonial Office, Report by His Majesty's Government in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland to the Council of the League of Nations on the Administration of the Tanganyika Territory for the Year 1938, Colonial No. 165 (London, 1939), p. 50. 5 Sir Bernard Bourdillon, “British Colonial Policy," World Affairs, Vol. 107 (1944), p. 83. the League of Nations budgets for 1920 to 1938 (that is for the entire active life of the League), which were just over $100,000,000. Grants in aid were made by other mandatory powers, e.g., South Africa gave South-West Africa about £550,000 in the period 1937 through 1939. 6 On the international side, mandates were affected by two great factors-first, the regional treatment of Africa in the Berlin and Brussels Acts (which applied to the mandated as well as other territories); and second, by League action taken on a world scale without any special reference to mandates, but which affected them as well as the rest of Africa, e.g., the Slavery Convention of 1926. The mandate system had a strict territorial application, and the provisions of Article 22 could be applied by the Mandates Commission, the Assembly, and the Council only in mandated territories, and then only in accordance with the special conditions governing each mandate as set out in the mandate text. The work of the Mandates Commission and of other League organs in supervising the operation of the mandate system did have a certain influence on other areas in Africa outside the mandated territories. But there was no legal or constitutional basis whereby the Commission, Assembly, or Council could extend any of the provisions of Article 22 or of the mandate texts to other African territories. The League, however, could take action in many fields by virtue of its general competence; and Article 23(b) of the Covenant, as we shall see below, gave it some basis for action in relation to dependencies in general. Thus by a route other than Article 22 the League could and did in practice extend some of the safeguards provided for in Article 22 to non-mandated territories. The effect of the regional African conventions-the Berlin and Brussels Acts and their St. Germain revisions of 1919-on the League mandate system in Africa, and on the League activities in Africa apart from the mandate system, is difficult to disentangle. The conventions set up certain standards and rules to be applied by the parties to them in the territories which they covered, which included for most purposes those under League mandate. The Mandates Commission had thus the duty of seeing that these rules and standards were applied in the mandated areas; but it could do nothing about their application in adjoining territories not under mandate. As for the League itself, two courses were • Union of South Africa, Report Presented by the Government of the Union of South Africa to the Council of the League of Nations concerning the Administration of South West Africa for the Year 1939, U.G. No. 30—1940, p. 49. open to it. One was to try to get the treaties working on a regional basis, i.e., in the way in which they were designed to work. Or it could make a fresh start and approach the matter on a universal basis, by prevailing upon the League members to agree to an international convention applying to all territories. And the new convention could be an improved model, better designed to achieve the objective than the rather vague and ill-drafted St. Germain conventions. The League could take up on the basis of its general competence a particular matter like slavery, where the cooperation of the governments was assured because of its humanitarian character, and could therefore, in effect, generalize throughout the world in a much improved convention a particular subject which the mandates and the Berlin and Brussels Acts covered less effectively. The League could thus in some cases do a better job on a world-wide basis-using as its instruments a general convention, and special League technical bodies, backed by the active interest and support of Assembly and Council-than its own mandate system could do in its own special area. The method worked successfully as regards slavery but not as regards the arms traffic. The attempt to universalize the provisions of the St. Germain arms traffic convention raised so many new and thorny problems that in the end the application of the convention in the limited area of Africa was impeded rather than assisted. In the case of the liquor traffic, on the other hand, the League made no attempt to take the matter up either on a regional or a general basis. It did little or nothing to secure the regional application of the St. Germain convention. The Assembly and Council confined their attention to liquor in relation to the mandated territories. The Mandates Commission did the best it could by seeing that the provisions were applied in these scattered territories. The situation was much the same as regards the open door, another important field covered by the Berlin Act as revised at St. Germain. Thus, territorial trusteeship worked in its limited sphere, in some cases where a general League solution on a functional or non-territorial basis was not attempted and in others where it was tried but broke down. This chapter and the next will examine therefore the relation of the League, and of the mandates part of it, to the matters covered by the African conventions-slavery, the arms and liquor traffic, the open door. It will be useful also to make some reference in this context to international labor aspects, since they illustrate much the same points. The International Labor Organization, like the League, worked on a par |