EMPIRE PROBLEMS

Waihi Daily Telegraph, Volume XXVII, Issue 7960, 4 February 1930, Page 3

EMPIRE PROBLEMS

ITREHGTHENINC Uf IMPERIAL CORD MOTHER COUNTRY’S TASK RELATIONS WITH DOMINIONSLONDON, January 4. The eminent publicist who, under the name of “Augur,” writes regularly in the Fortnightly Review, has a provocative article entitled “What of England?” in the January issue of that periodical. After emphasising the changed conditions which enabled Mr” Ramsay MacDonald, who fought continually against the war, to stand beside the Cenotaph in Whitehall on Armistice Day as Premier, “Augur” attempts to explain England’s standing to-day. He says: “The changes which permit a pacifist to pay homage at the Cenotaph are only superficial and the country’s destinies are, in reality unchanged. The true motive of England’s entry into the war was fear of German predominance on the Continent. As the result of a lower English standard of living after the war, came the new danger of the permanent unemployment of more than 1,000,000 people. Hundreds of thousands of men and women have been workless for years and content to take the dole as their supreme end and ambition. This is more dangerous than if unemployment had bred revolution.

. IMAGINATION WANTED “People have looked to their political leaders for salvation, but the politicians prefer to cripple each other’s chances by criticism and bribery in the form of electoral promises, in which Labour politicians are the worst offenders. Mr MacDonald and his friends now admit the impossibility of providing work* or maintenance for the unemployed.” “Augur” admits his inability to say how far things are worse now than they were before; He pleads for a national three-party Government to solve unemployment, but confesses he cannot see how the parties in their present tempers will permit this. He adds that the unemployment problem comes under two heads: First, the necessity for reducing the workless; and secondly, the prevention of large numbers of workers from going on the dole in future.

To effect a reduction, he says, it is necessary to reorganise the system of credit for industry, and to give some form of protection against outside competition for industries, including agriculture. Free trade is still a fetish, and could not be preserved, unless Europe’s customs and barriers are removed, which is most improbable. One other thing is needed, and that is imagination. Material resources continue to be wasted, and popular enthusiasm will be turned to bitterness if the leaders are content to plod on with their noses on the ground without looking up to the horizon. Visiion is particularly needed to connect the various branches of the Empire., The problem -of the English Commonwealth exists because in the past England produced men who dared to face the future without safeguards and the dole.

THE NEED FOR UNITY Referring to the recent Imperial Constitutional Conference, and discussing the basic reason for South Africa and the Irish Free State wishing to get rid of the Privy Council Judicial Committee, “Augur” complains of the lack of statesmanlike vision displayed in a general inclination to accept the committee’s inevitable dissolution by simply waiting for the thing to happen. He wants to see the committee given a useful life by lopping off useless branches, thus preserving it for the whole Empire. He says that perhaps the whole constitution could be revised, making the committee a Court of Arbitration.

“It is for England to initiate such a step,” he says, “and not wait for the attack against the committee to develop in a form very disadvantageous to the Empire’s unity. There will be no quarrel with the formula that the dependence of the Dominions on England has now been replaced by co-operation and an established mutual consent on the basis of perfect equality, but the Empire cannot exist if England falls out. Since the war there has been an English inferiority complex in regard to the attitude of some of the Dominions in the British Commonwealth which should not be a house of which sojne inhabitants remain to set fire to it. The Dominions, with their centrifugal tendencies, should be told that England is the strongest, richest and most powerful member of the Commonwealth, which, without England, cannot exist. Such language would result in the strengthening of the Imperial bond.”