which formerly owned them, and which are inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." The Covenant goes on to say that the well-being and development of such peoples forms a sacred trust of civilisation, and that their "tutelage" should be entrusted to "advanced nations," who would be the League's mandatories.
It seems to be widely assumed that the wording of the Covenant permits of the extension of this system of "mandatories" to the whole of Africa. I can find no justification whatever for the belief. There is nothing in the wording of the Covenant which suggests that the framers of this instrument contemplate submitting their political control in Africa, except as regards the additional territory they have acquired through the war, to the supervision of the League. The mandatory purpose is clearly limited to the territory formerly governed by the States recently at war with the States responsible for drawing up the Covenant.
So far as Africa is concerned those territories are the former German dependencies, viz., Togo and Kamerun, in Western tropical Africa; Damaraland or German South-West Africa; and German East Africa. In the case of German South-West Africa, it is laid down that that particular territory shall become an "integral portion" of the mandatory's territory. From the point of view of political control, then, all that the Covenant does is to provide that the African territories formerly administered by Germany shall be administered henceforth by the European States which have conquered Germany in arms. In point of fact this obvious design was promptly consummated, before the ratification of the Peace Treaty, of which the Covenant forms part, i.e., before the League—which is composed exclusively of the States formerly at war with Germany—acquired legal existence. German South-West Africa passed to the Union of South Africa. Britain and France divided the Kamerun and Togo between them, and Britain took German East Africa, subsequently presenting Belgium with a substantial slice of it. In other words the "mandatory system" was introduced into the Covenant as a device to distribute Germany's dependencies in Africa between such of
