COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS

Press, Volume XCI, Issue 27678, 7 June 1955, Page 10

COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS

Sir Leslie Munro's Address

(N.Z. Press Association—Copyright) (Rec. 10 p.m.) WASHINGTON, June 6. Sir Leslie Munro, the New Zealand Ambassador, said today that among Britain's greatest achievements was “the planting in the great Republic of India of the British ideas of parliamentary government and the rule of law.”

Sir Leslie Munro, in an address prepared for delivery at the commencement ceremonies of the University of Omaha, suggested that to Americans the Commonwealth of Nations might not seem tightly enough knit.

“Yet I insist that it will be a working example of the way in which people of different races and of very different development can achieve a modus vivendi.

“It will indeed be an object lesson in the way in which East and West can live together, bound at any rate by a common tradition of government and of law, born of that mother of democratic institutions, Great Britain,” he said. , -r x_ Americans, in their search for freedom from certain intolerable relationships with Britain, had yet never really broken off all connexion. On the other hand, New Zealanders, Australians, Canadians and South Africans—also former colonies —had very drastically altered the nature of their association with Great Britain but had remained in rather close relationship. “And now today we are all—we Britishers and Americans very closely allied together. Indeed, the Commonwealth-American alliance is the very foundation of the strength of the Western world, and the strong bulw’ark of our ideals of political democracy. “The result is that, in practical terms, there is nowadays surprisingly little difference between New Zealand’s relationship with Great Britain and your own,” Sir Leslie Munro said. ______________