THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 1918. THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LV, Issue 16850, 15 May 1918, Page 6

THE New Zealand Herald AND DAILY SOUTHERN CROSS. WEDNESDAY, MAY 15, 1918. THE POLITICS OF EMPIRE.

When the Kaiser and his Prussian fire-eaters chose, in the fateful August of 1914, to throw down the gauntlet to all Europe, they reckoned as best they could the chances in their favour. Amongst these was the apparent pre-occupa-tion of Great Britain in domestic problems. Industrial strife was afoot, Ireland was restive, and the increase of responsible government in the colonial outgrowths of Empire was inducing demands for adult rights overseas. The calculation was at fault. Erring in its assessment of the magnitude of the disturbing factors, it made its major mistake in expressing Britain's overseas development in terms of disintegration. It did not enter the German political thought, unacoustomed to regard colonies as anything but enterprises of exploitation, that the freedom sought by the British dominions beyond the seas was merely a freedom of speech at the council table of the nation. Those who craved this liberty had in view the consolidation of the Empire, not its dismemberment, and the war has contributed largely to that consolidation. Instead of profiting by a disunion embarrassing his enemy, Wilhelm 11. has himself proved an unwitting missionary of .British Imperial unity. He mistook for wilful and rebellious cravings after an alien independence the reasoned requests for legislative privileges due to maturity. All that the overseas virtually self-governing States asked was a freedom to co-operate in a responsible way with their Mother Country. They had no thoughts of setting up separate homes of their own. The war has hastened the achievement of liberty, equality and fraternity among the members of the scattered British family, and it is not without deep meaning for the future that, while the fight against our Empire's enemy is at its fiercest, the most representative men of that Empire's outlying countries are gathering for mutual counsel on vital Imperial concerns.

War has thus again provided the occasion for Britain's Imperial consolidation. As it was in the days of the last Boer War and in the time of challenge of our freedom of the seas, so has it been, but with an unprecedented earnestness, in this colossal struggle. ' Our Constitution is such that changes in administrative method wait jm occasions necessitating them. We have no cut-and-dried scheme of Imperial polity, no written Constitution. This fact has given us the adaptable institutions that have grown with the increase of Parliamentary, power and of territorial extent. The Cabinet, the Prime Minister, the Parliamentary Committee, have all arisen thus. And the developments foreshadowed by the meetings of the Imperial War Cabinet and War Conference . will follow the line of a sane and sure expediency. Lord Haldane expressed this well when he said: " It is not to some new kind of written Constitution, with a new description of a common Parliament, that we look, but' to gradual and cautious changes in the mode in which the Sovereign takes advice." . In that last phrase are historically Bummed all the changes since Walpole's day. The fashioning of ready-made schemes of Imperial governance, planned elaborately to meet every conceivable political requirement, is quite gratuitous. Sir Joseph Ward propounded to the Imperial Conference of 1911 his scheme for an Imperial Parliament, having its own executive, responsible to it and not to the British Parliament, he committed this blunder, as the reasoned opposition of Mr. Asquith, Mr. Fisher, General Botha, and Sir Wilfrid Laurier convincingly showed. Mr. Asquith's clear judgment was that such a scheme would be " fatal to the fundamental conditions on which the Empire has been built up and carried on" and would " impair, if not altogether destroy, the authority of the Government of the United Kingdom." The order of reference for the business of this year's Imperial War Cabinet expressly precludes discussion of its own future development. There will be enough on hand without that. But, while there may be no formal discussion of the permanent outcome of these essays in Imperial statecraft, it is inevitable that the final product (if there is ever a final product) of the practical experiment will be affected by this re-assembly of our representative statesmen. Already a long march has been taken on the road to a political union of the Empire since the day when the Committee of Imperial Defence was set up. It was merely an advisory body, comprising the British Prime Minister, the Secretaries of State for Foreign Affairs, India, and the Colonies, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, and the heads of the naval and military departments. It was given a right to call to its meetings any experts whose advice might be deemed necessary; and, as Mr. Balfour (its creator) emphasised, its special merit was its power to summon to its deliberations representatives of the Overseas Dominions. The members of the Imperial Conference of 1911 were so summoned, and heard Sir Edward Grey's enunciation of foreign policy. Mr. Borden, in his first term as Canada's Prime Minister, was privileged, with his colleagues visiting England, to hear in its sessions a confidential statement of the policy to be followed in the event of war. Then Mr. Lewis Harcourt, as Secretary of State for the Colonies, introduced the plan of having the self-governing States of the Empire represented regularly and permanently, in the committee itself. So tho Imperial War Cabinet gradually came into being. It is to be summoned annually, or at more frequent intervals, should Imperial

occasion demand. Its members are the British Prime Minister and such of his colleagues as deal especially with Imperial affairs, the Prime Minister of each of the Dominions or some accredited substitute of equal authority, and " a representative of the Indian people to be appointed by the Government of India." It should not be difficult to extend its scope when war is over and make it jmor.3 widely serviceable. At all events, it has provided a way, as Mr. Lloyd George suggests, for "perfecting the mechanism for continuous consultation about Imperial affairs between the autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth." As a further step towards such perfecting of the politics of Empire, the proposal to be made by Earl Brassey to the forthcoming meeting of the Colonial Institute may be an inevitable preliminary. His motion involves the definite limiting of the powers of the British Parliament to the domestic affairs of the United Kingdom as a " condition precedent" to constitutional reconstruction for the Empire as a whole. That may well ; be ; but in the meantime the Empire Cabinet, responsible still to the British Parliament, can accomplish all that is immediately necessary/and prepare the way for the more thorough-going change that time and tact will make possible.