The Press Monday, September 29, 1930. The Imperial Conference.

Press, Volume LXVI, Issue 20045, 29 September 1930, Page 10

The Press Monday, September 29, 1930. The Imperial Conference.

Although the Imperial Conference opens on Wednesday we have still only the haziest notion of its probable course and issue. We do not even know with deflniteness what subjects will be discussed, since the agenda has been changed twice, and may easily be changed again now that the delegates are all in London. But it is quite certain that economics will overshadow politics, and quite likely that the constitutional questions which seemed so important at the last Conference will now get only formal attention. Even South Africa, though it still takes secession seriously, puts bread and butter first; the Irish Free State is absorbed in its domestic problems; India, so far as it influences Imperial Conferences, has no voice at present to speak with. And there is not even an academic interest in " iude : " pendence " in Canada, Australia, or New Zealand. The right to secede is, as Mr Scullin has just told the London interviewers, inherent in equality of status. It is inherent in self-govern-ment, and always has been. Yet the only peftple who have ever given it serious attention are those whom it does not directly concern—foreigners looking for signs of disintegration in the Empire, and depressed theorists at homo who are alarmed by them. Mr Forbes is not a theorist, or a thinker, or a very well-informed observer, but he has said all that New Zealand wants him to say, all that it knows or thinks or,cares about the subject, in his halfdozen words to the London newspapers: " These questions are of deeper concern to other parts of the Empire." There may of course be serious discussions, and serious divisions, on the problems of foreign policy and defence, but as there is no present crisis in that field, it is not likely to get very close attention. For there is an economic crisis, almost everywhere, and it is doubtful if the present Conference would ever have been held if there had not been some kind of hope that agreements would be reached which will ease the pressure of bad times. It is perhaps getting as near to the truth as at this stage is possible to say that what the Empire expects from i the Conference is that it will somehow ! or other enable the Homeland and the Dominions to " get together" in an effort to bring back prosperity. Free Trade within the Empire is of course impossible; but freer trade may not be, and even if it is, it will be helpful to be made more vividly aware of one another's difficulties. It is not sufficient to have better consultative machinery than we once had, and to be on better long-distance speaking terms. It is necessary that New Zealand should meet Canada, which will no longer take her butters, Canada Australia, which is taking less and less of her machinery, and that even India should meet Ireland, all together and face to face, if the potential resources pf the Empire are to be made actual, and to be developed to something more like their full capacity. Unless some such result as this is achieved the Conference will fail, and perhaps fail very badly. For* if it is true, as there ia some ground for saying that it is, that this is the most important Conference ever held, it is equally true that a negative result will be a bigger disappointment than any so far recorded. The object of all Conferences is closer union. There is no other object, and never can be. But the result of the last Conference—the only measurable result achieved since the war—-could almost be described as completer disunion, and 'must be described, however we regard it, as a more definite reduction of the Empire to a group of independent States. It is not true, or half true, that equality of status means independence of action; but equality makes independence more possible, and more likely, if we do nothing in the economic Add to set off what has been done , constitutionally. There are even pessimists—Mr Richard Jebb, for example—who think that, if the coming Conference yields no practical results, no Other Conferences should be held. That is an extreme view which will comfort our enemies, and which means little more.in truth than that Mr Jebb has been embittered by the persistence with which successive British Governments cling to Free Trade. But it would be depressing even to Free Traders if the Conference failed to achieve closer economic co-operation, and if there had not been a good hope of bringing that about, it would have i better not to meet just now.