198 J.-A. PEMBERTON
In his Christian Science Monitor article, Staley stated that in addi-
tion to the general agreement that much nonsense had been aired in
the course of discussions centred on the theme of have and have-not
states, what was striking about the conference was that it ‘registered
the decided shift in attitude towards colonies and those who possess
them’ that had emerged in recent years: that colonies could no longer
be regarded as ‘private preserves’ of metropolitan powers but must be
administered in interests of the local population. Staley noted that the
British experts at the conference had insisted especially that ‘one must
expect colonies to “grow up” and achieve independence’ and that in
the meantime ‘colonial administration must be regarded as trusteeship,
not as an opportunity for exploitation.’^387 Wright similarly thought that
the conference had registered the shift in attitude towards colonies that
was then occurring. He observed in this regard that in the United States
and in Britain the sentiment that it is ‘inherently unnatural’ for a peo-
ple of a ‘very different culture’ to be governed by a metropolitan cen-
tre was widely recognised and that it now appeared that the regime of
colonial administration by particular powers was but a temporary one.^388
Wright pointed out that the United States had ‘recently decided vol-
untarily to accord independence to the Philippines’ and that Sir Cecil
Hurst had stated in a lecture at the University of Chicago that the British
Commonwealth of Nations conceived of its entire colonial system as a
‘ladder by which all the colonies could eventually mount to Dominion
status and that it made no difference whether their population was black
or white.’^389
As noted above, although the conference recognised that the princi-
ple of trusteeship had begun to take hold well before the war, it was of
the view that its hold had markedly tightened following the war’s end
as a result of Article 22 of the Covenant of the League of Nations as
via this article the principle had been rendered a part of contemporary
international law. Bertram J. O. Schrieke, a professor of colonial ethnol-
ogy at the University of Amsterdam, told the conference that despite the
(^387) Staley, ‘What Price Self-Sufficiency?’ 5. See also Malcolm W. Davis, ‘Peaceful Change:
An Analysis of Some Current Proposals,’ Problems of Peace: Twelfth Series, Geneva and the
Drift Towards War (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1938), 156–57.
(^388) International Studies Conference, Peaceful Change: Procedures, Population, Raw
Materials, Colonies, 459–60.
(^389) Ibid., 460.