BIRTHS. Wednesday, December 18, 1929. Imperial Relations.

Press, Volume LXV, Issue 19805, 18 December 1929, Page 10

BIRTHS. Wednesday, December 18, 1929. Imperial Relations.

Although the Imperial Conf'Tcnee of l:>2(i inaugurated a great constitutional change, when it adopted declarations according equality of status with Great Britain to the self-governing Dominions, its. implications and consequences are still far from being well understood. In foreign'affairs the Dominions have a recognised status on the League of Nations, and on questions affecling the Empire are consulted by the Home Government before action is taken or a decision made. Some of the Dominions, notably Canada, have token advantage of '" equal status " to appoint Ministers to foreign capitals; and another, the Irish Free State, Js apparently seeking to abolish the right of appeal to the King, generally known as an appeal to the Privy Council, though this right appears to follow naturally from the fact that a subject of the British Crown remains a subject whether in Ireland or in any other selfgoverning Dominion. There are other points of obscurity or difficulty; and the problems of interpreting practically the declarations of the 1926 Conference were referred to by Mr Ramsay MacDonald when speaking at the Lord Mayor's banquet in London hist month.

" The Dominions, young, growing, and " virile, and ourselves/' he said, " to- " gether face one of the most intricate " problems that politicians ever had to " face. The problem is how to unite " in the family unity two diametrically ".opposed objects —the object of ind?- " pendent nationhood, and the object "of common allegiance. There is a " Committee representative of the Do- " minions and ourselves trying f o " hammer out in the language of cou- " stitutional law how the geneiv.l deelar- " ations of the 1926 Conference can be " carried out.*' The Committee referred to by Mr Mac Donald is the Imperial Conference on Empire Legislation, which has been sitting in London since October, and oa which Sir James Parr and Mr S. G. Raymond, K.C., represented New Zealand. Proceedings were strictly in committee; but according to a statement made by Lord Passfleld early in November, the members of the Conference were working out the intricate legal and constitutional problems which followed from the Declaration of 1926, that the Dominions were sister nations, autonomous, and on an equality with the Mother Country. It was. Lord Passfield observed, easy to say that; but it was not so easy to bring the law into conformity with what had become the constitutional fact. The further they proceeded with the business, the more fully they realised that something had to be substituted for the former legal supremacy; and what they had to substitute was a bond of convention anil agreement based on unlimited freedom and equality, but providing for unrestricted voluntary co-operation. The report of that Conference will be awaited with very keen interest; for there seems to be a very real anxiety that the Declaration of 1926 should receive a common and a stabilised interpretation. Mr Ramsay Mac Donald himself expressed this when he said in London, early last month, " I pray that " the delegates from the Dominions and "our own delegates do remember that, "whatever the temptation may be to "the contrary, the Commonwealth of " British nations must be kept together, "and can be kept together only in so " far as we subordinate the sense of " individualism to the sense of com- " munity, only in so far as we find the "pride in our national traditions ." greater than the mere badge of inde- " pendent authority." Without the regulation which it is hoped will result from the work of the Conference, it seems that any self-governing Dominion ! could not be denied the power of giving what interpretation-it chose to the 19215 I Declaration. In other words, nothing i it chose to do, apart from disclaiming I a common kingship, could be considered unconstitutional. It is therefore to be hoped that the recommendations of the Conference may be found acceptable, and so assist in stabilising the new Imperial relationships.