EMPIRE DEVELOPMENT

Wanganui Chronicle, Volume LXXXI, Issue 19007, 7 May 1924, Page 5

EMPIRE DEVELOPMENT

GOVERNMENT’S UNFORTUNATE POLICY EFFECTS ILLUSTRATED Received May 6, 5.5 p.m. LONDON, May 6. At the Imperial Industries’ Club dinner, Sir James Allen presiding, Mr F. L. McDougall said that owing to the unfortunate aftermath of the Economic Conference, Australia would probably have to extend British paper preference to Canadian paper, cotton, woollens and dyes. This well illustrated the deliberate shelter from foreign competition given to British trade by Australian preferences. Would Britain realise that au orderly policy of Empire development might be the only safeguard in the era of intensified industrial competition which the restoration of Europe must involve? It was essential, if Empire development was to be safe in the hands of British democracy, that it should be made clear that Imperial policy was never imperious, that the ideals of the empires of Spain or Portugal, with their prohibitions of trade to all foreigners, could never be revived, and that we did not intend to follow the hundred per cent, discrimination against foreigners which America and Japan now employed in their dependencies. Our ideal must be an. Empire as self-depen-dent as possible concerning essential foodstuffs and raw materials, a Commonwealth within which British trade would reasonably be preferred, but in which foreign competition was not excluded. But it was most important that the Empire should be a union of free peoples. With this ideal of Empire development, wc must win the affections of British democracy and British Labour.

Sir Joseph Cook said Australia and New Zealand took up the position that they begged for nothing, but were conscious that it was not in the interests of the Empire that they should have to betake themselves to the course that now remained open to them. They felt that if the Empire was good enough to fight for it was good enough to trade with, and they declined to apply the strict mathematical economic consideration to the development of the Empire’s future. Rather, they fell back upon the King’s statement that it was their duty, even at some sacrifice, to develop the family estate. —Aus.-N.Z. Cable Assn.