How Much Self-Government Is There?
To the visitor seeing a native village or district council for the first time, its scantily clad members, perhaps sitting on floor mats and engaging in seemingly endless talk and ritual, there may be little to remind him of the city or county council or courtroom back home. Yet he will soon discover that, backed by the weight of tradition, it provides on the whole a very efficient system of local self-government. Even the extension to it of outside government authority and the coming of new laws made by the white man have disturbed it very little. Outside this local system of order, however, the native is not on familiar ground. He now has to get along with other peoples with whom he used to argue things out by means of clubs and spears. Few of the island jurisdictions as they have been carved out in modern days had any unified native government or loyalty. A major problem of colonial authorities, therefore, has been to build toward self-government on a territory-wide basis, so as to g
