IMPROVING COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS.

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLV, Issue 21156, 1 October 1938, Page 8

IMPROVING COMMONWEALTH RELATIONS.

Returning from the second British Commonwealth Relations Conference in New South Wales, Mr Frank Milner, who is well-known as a sturdy imperialist and as a keen and critical student of the march of world affairs, ventured the opinion that from the average New Zealand standpoint and apart from the rich opportunity of contacts with delegates from every part of the Empire, the results of the conference were disappointingly meagre. Discussing the conference Mr Milner said: "Buch a conference is certainly worth while as an assessment of Dominion political and economic trends, and of the resultant effect of these national urges on the Empire as a whole. Its personnel, however, should constitute a balanced and authoritative representation of informed public opinion in each constituent part of the Empire. But Mr Milner was disappointed from another angle; indeed, he pointed out that according to the report of the official recorder, “such a lowest common denominator could not be found as an outcome of the discussions of the present conference in any affirmation of intrinsic or inherent values and ideals of the Commonwealth as a political entity; but only in its moral function implicit in the inter-relation of its parts as the administration of a future world order.” But Mr Milner is equal to the occasion and in his characteristically rich vocabulary he thus pronounces judgment: ‘This pious postulation of a solely millennial justification for the Empire is altogether too evanescent and phantasmal to satisfy the viewpoint of the average New Zealander, no matter how it may appear to the doctrinaire.”

That may be so! It can nevertheless be said, with some degree of emphasis, that the average well-informed New Zealander should gain something of an inspiration from close contact with representative and wideawake Englishmen, more particularly in view of the closer and more intelligent interest being taken in the Homeland in the implementation of the Statute of Westminster and the evolution of the Overseas Dominions from Crown Colonies to the full stature of nationhood with equality of status with the United Kingdom.