in the nature of things this can be merely an unverifiable hypothesis.1 It is hardly possible to say in any deeper sense what the mandate system is, unless we can explain clearly what it is not. If we do not see clearly what it is not, we run the risk of ascribing to it characteristics which we wrongly assume are peculiar to it. The point is important because from it stem most of the widely held misconceptions and hasty generalizations regarding the system-the underestimates as well as the overvaluations. "The Mandate system," Lord Lugard said in his article on the subject in the Encyclopedia Britannica, "is a term applied to the conditions set up by the Treaty of Versailles for the administration of the former overseas possessions of Germany and Turkey." To the extent that any simple definition can do so, this goes to the heart of the matter. The system was an expedient invented to solve a practical difficulty which confronted the Peace Conference. In order to deal with the question of dependencies taken over from the enemy the Conference had to find an agreed principle and to define in the broadest terms the conditions which were to govern its ultimate application.

2. THE ORDER IN WHICH THINGS WERE DONE IN 1919-1923 2

An understanding of the precedent of 1919 depends upon a clear view of the order in which things happened. The order of 1919-23 was: First, the Covenant, which was confined to a statement of general principles and conditions. Second, the Peace Treaties (Versailles, June 28, 1919, Sèvres, August 10, 1920, Lausanne, July 24, 1923), which ceded the ex-enemy territories to the Principal Allied and Associated Powers.3 Third, a series of political decisions by the Allies. The Allies decided (a) which ex-enemy territories were to become mandates; (b) which were to be left outside the mandate system; and (c) they drew up the

1 See Emanuel Moresco, Colonial Questions and Peace (Paris: International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, League of Nations, 1939), pp. 179 ff. 2 For a detailed account of this important transitional period, see below, Chapter X.

3 By Article 119 of the Versailles Treaty Germany renounced her colonies in favor of the Principal Allied and Associated Powers, but she did so conditionally, the condition being that set out in Article 22 of the treaty, namely, that these colonies would become mandates. The position as regards Turkey was somewhat different. Under the Treaty of Lausanne (Article 16) Turkey simply renounced her rights to territories outside the frontiers laid down in the treaty, "the future of these territories and islands being settled or to be settled by the Parties concerned." The Covenant of the League of Nations did not form part of the Lausanne Treaty as it did in the case of the other peace treaties. The Covenant (Article 22) had referred only to "certain communities formerly belonging to the Turkish Empire" as prospective mandates. See below, Chapter III, section 2.

terms of the mandates. Fourth, the League (in force from January 10, 1920), which proceeded in the next two or three years to confirm the mandates, to clarify the texts of the mandates with the mandatory powers, to create the Permanent Mandates Commission, and to get the mandate system as a whole into full working order. It is important to understand why this procedure was adopted at the end of the first World War, and such understanding is dependent on knowing why other alternatives were rejected.

The essential point to bear in mind is that the Covenant was confined to laying down general principles and conditions, and thus avoided what would have been, as we shall see, the almost fatal mistake of attempting to say to what territories these principles might ultimately apply. But first we must look at the principles themselves.

The Paris Peace Conference had to choose between three alternatives for the ex-enemy territories: (1) annexation; (2) direct international administration; (3) the intermediate solution-for which there were precedents of government of the territory by a state under mandate from the powers and from the League. It chose the third. As conceived by the Peace Conference the mandate system was not merely an expedient limited to a particular situation; it was also thought of as something essentially temporary in character. The assumption was that it would come to an end when the various mandated territories were able to "stand by themselves."

3. ESSENTIAL FACTS OF THE MANDATE SYSTEM

Before proceeding further, some of the essential facts regarding the mandate system may be given. The basic texts are: (1) Article 22 of the League Covenant, which sets out the governing principles and outlines the machinery; (2) the mandate charters for the respective mandated territories, which may be regarded as "executive conventions for the application of these principles." 5 Each mandate had the following clause: "The consent of the Council of the League of Nations is required for any modification of the terms of this mandate." The Covenant named neither the mandated territories nor the mandatory powers. The African mandates (except Ruanda-Urundi which was established

6

+ See Annex I, below, for the text of the article.

5 League of Nations, Ten Years of World Co-operation ([Geneva]: Secretariat of the League of Nations, 1930), pp. 330, 333.

In some instances there was a slight variation in wording not affecting the substance. For texts of the three types of mandates, see below, Annexes III, IV, V.

later) and the Pacific mandates and their mandatory powers were named by the Supreme Council of the Allied and Associated Powers on May 7, 1919. The Asiatic mandates and the mandatory powers were named by the Supreme Council at San Remo on April 25, 1920. A list of the mandates, "A," "B," and "C," and of the mandatory powers, as they stood in the year 1939 (and in 1947), is contained in Annex II, below; and the differences between the three classes are discussed in a subsequent chapter. The machinery provided in Article 22 for exercising supervision over the carrying out by the mandatory powers of the terms of the mandates, centered in the League Council and its advisory body, the Permanent Mandates Commission, which was one of the two permanent League commissions expressly provided for in the League Covenant. The Council had the primary responsibility for supervising the mandate administration, but the Assembly of the League was free to discuss any questions relating to mandates. The Mandates Commission was set up and appointed by the Council "to advise the Council," as Article 22 says, "on all matters relating to the observance of the mandates." It consisted of ten or eleven members acting in a personal capacity. They could not hold offices making them directly dependent on their governments, i.e., they did not represent their governments on the Commission. The majority were nationals of non-mandatory states. The Commission examined, in the presence of an accredited representative of the government, the annual report to the League Council submitted by each mandatory power. The observations of the Commission on each territory were embodied in its report to the League Council, and the latter, in turn, transmitted the observations to the governments. The Commission was purely advisory; it had "no power to render any decisions or to make direct recommendations to the Mandatories." Petitions from inhabitants of the mandated territories had to be forwarded to the league through the mandatory powers. They were examined by the Commission in accordance with rules laid down by the Council. The Mandates Commission held thirty-seven sessions, the last being in December, 1930. After that date no annual reports or petitions were examined, though a few were received in the earlier part of the war by the League Secretariat?

* Com doma on it oná Chedoration, MA at p 300. See below, Chapter X. secto $ the canguron of the Permanent Mandates Commission; and Chapter 2x sonton and procedure

4. THE "SACRED TRUST" 10

The basic principle of the "sacred trust," both in its older form and in the newer form of the "dual mandate" (trust for native peoples and trust for the world at large) which Lord Lugard expounded and popularized, had been applied first in British dependencies. The conception of the sacred trust and the phrase itself come from Burke's famous opening speech for the House of Commons, on February 15, 1788, indicting Warren Hastings. The dual mandate received international legal recognition from the powers at the Berlin African Conference of 1885; and it was powerfully reenforced from 1900 onwards by American policy towards its newly acquired overseas dependencies. The League Covenant gave the principle a clearer and more solemn expression and made it the basis of the new system of international supervision devised for the ex-enemy territories. In a limited area international trusteeship was set up alongside of national trusteeship. The latter, with its long historical background and deeply rooted administrative experience, went on independently of the application of trusteeship within the mandate system, but has been strongly reenforced by the wider extension of the principle.

The principle of the sacred trust was thus a general one. Its particular application under the mandate system, as worked out over the years 1919-23, had in it a large element of haphazard and accident. This becomes clear when we look at the territories to which the system finally applied. In doing so we must not lose sight of the fact that the selection of territories to which the principle was to apply was not something specified in the Covenant, but negotiated subsequently by the Allied Powers.

5. EX-ENEMY TERRITORIES-MANDATES BORN OF WAR

It was indeed a strange assortment of territories that the backwash of successful war against Germany and Turkey and the principle of "no annexations" flung finally together under the new system. The principle of no annexations could not of course be made retrospective. It had to be applied at a particular point of time. But we have only to look at the map to see how arbitrarily this principle seemed to work out in practice. It cut across an archipelago here or an island there, leaving 10 See below, Chapter VIII, section 3.

one half as a national dependency and making the other half an international mandate. At one extreme were ranged most of the ex-Turkish territories (not all of them, since the Arabian peninsula was left out). Iraq and Palestine (later divided into two territories, with the separation of Trans-Jordan) were mandated to Great Britain; Syria and Lebanon to France. These were cradles of western civilization and of great religions of Europe and Asia; and their peoples were capable of becoming independent states within a short period of time if they could. in fact devise constitutions based on the consent of the main elements of the population.

At the other extreme the mandate system roped in savage stone-age clans, not even yet at the tribal stage, living a life that was indeed "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short," amidst the untamed jungles and unexplored alps of northeastern New Guinea and adjoining islands. But the southern and western ends of the great island of New Guinea still remained Australian and Dutch dependencies. Further west in the Pacific the line of the mandate cut directly across the fourteen islands of the Samoan archipelago, all inhabited by the same Samoan people. The eight former German islands were mandated to New Zealand. The other six Samoan islands which had been taken over by the United States of America in 1900 (at the same time as the Germans annexed their half) remained an American possession, governed as a naval station by a Commandant of the American Navy. On the equator a phosphate mine, the tiny island of Nauru, was mandated to the British Empire without affecting the British colonial status of a similar phosphate mine, Ocean Island, some miles to the east. North of the equator were the ex-German islands mandated to Japan: the Marshalls (taken over by Germany in 1885), the Carolines, the Marianas, the Palaus (which Spain sold to Germany in 1898 for $4,200,000). The only island in these groups not included in the mandate was Guam in the Marianas, which remained an American possession. It had been taken over from Spain during the Spanish-American War in 1898, a fortnight before Congress resolved by joint resolution on the annexation of the Hawaiian Islands.

In Africa mandates were set up in the midst of dependent territories administered by a number of different powers. South-West Africa, bordering on the Union, became a South African mandate. Tanganyika, in East Africa, became a British mandate, wedged between the British colony of Kenya to the north, the Portuguese colony of Mozambique to the south, and to the west British Northern Rhodesia and the Belgian