EMPIRE AS WORKING MODEL

Hawera Star, Volume XLIX, 6 January 1930, Page 5

EMPIRE AS WORKING MODEL

SCOPE FOR SMALLER PEOPLES. PATTERN FOR LEAGUE AIMS. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, Jan. 4. General Smuts, the South African statesman, made a remarkable speech on the British Empire at a luncheon given by the Canadian Club at Montreal. He said, he felt it was a unique characteristic of the Empire that it had given scope and ottered opportunities to small peoples as no Empire of the past had done. The British Empire had deliberately set itself to encourage a variety of types and institutions and to procure an interwoven pattern in which scope was left for every kind of diversity. Since for the smaller peoples there could be no better or more beneficent system, he held that they should be foremost in preserving it as a guarantee for their liberties and privileges such as they eo-uld l secure by no other agency. General Smuts claimed that the Empire had served as a working model for the League of Nations, and expressed the belief that the existence of the Empire was the best augury for the permanent success of the League, which was achieving invaluable results.

The last ten years, continued General Smuts, had been spent in elaborating the status of the Dominions and securing for .them constitutional equality with the Mother Country, and the help and goodwill of British statesmen of all parties had always been available. But this achievement was only half of the battle. Years might be given over with the same zeal to the achievement of closer co-operation and real solidarity in policy. He made this plea as a man who had given some of the best years of his life in fighting to escape from the British flag, and he spoke as no lover of Imperialism as a doctrine, but be felt that the British Empire was an institution of unique type and of inestimable value, and that its citizens would show little evidence of political sagacity and foresight if they did not hand it on undimmed in vigour to their children, so that it might play an even more beneficent part in the world’s affairs than it bad already done.