The Purpose of Empire Nothing could be better than the
statement on the aims of British Colonial policy made by the Colonial Secretary, Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, at Oxford, on Tuesday. If we are to be fit to administer a colonial empire at all our colonial policy must have a &finite aim, and a right aim With territories as distant and dissimilar as Malaya _ and the Barbadoes and Nigeria to administer it is all too easy to be satisfied with mere day-to-day improvisations and conclude that no single principle is applicable to conditions so divergent. Mr. MacDonald vigorously rejects all that. For him the primary aim is " the gradual spread of freedom among His Majesty's subjects in whatever part of the Empire they live," and the ultimate goal—realisable perhaps only after centuries—" the establishment of the various colonial communities as self-supporting and self-reliant members of a great Commonwealth of free peoples and nations." That conception of duty towards native races is not approved by all the British Dominions, but it may be hoped that a long line of Mr. MacDonald's successors will shape their policy by it. Fifteen years ago the late, Duke of Devonshire, as Colonial Secretary, enunciated the then heretical doctrine that where the interests of African natives and non-African immigrants clashed the former should prevail ; Mr. Mac- Donald has respectable precedent behind him.
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