A.—2

8

efforts to gain many of those improvements would have been of no avail without the similar efforts of many other delegations. We were gratified to discover among them many who shared our points of view and whose sincere beliefs coincided to a large degree with our own. Throughout the Conference, as before it, we maintained the closest relationship with the Australian delegation. The examination of the Dumbarton Oaks plan made by both our Governments at Wellington in October, 1944, and the common viewpoint on work! organization problems then reached remained the basis of the policies of the Australian and New Zealand delegations at San Francisco. I am very glad indeed to have this opportunity of paying tribute to the outstanding work of the able Australian delegation, and in particular to the valuable services of Mr. Forde, the Deputy Prime Minister, and Dr. H. V. Evatt, the Commonwealth Minister of External Affairs. Among the other smaller and middle Powers, 1 would mention particularly the delegations of Belgium, the Netherlands, Mexico, Greece, Egypt, Brazil, Chile, and Cuba. Our policies did not. coincide in every detail, but in many important respects we shared a mutual understanding, sympathy, and enthusiasm. The part which the New Zealand delegation played in the Conference is described in detail in the later sections of this report dealing with the work of the various technical Committees. I propose in this general section to discuss only some of the more important points. The Preamble of the Charter was the subject of much discussion. The New Zealand delegation had welcomed the draft put forward by Field Marshal Smuts during the London conversations in support of his proposal that the Charter should be introduced by a Preamble setting forth in language which should appeal to the heart as well as the mind of men the purposes which the United Nations were setting themselves to achieve. Unhappily, the somewhat involved draft later tabled at the San Francisco Conference failed to reproduce, in the opinion of the New Zealand delegation, the simplicity, force, and distinction of the language which they had heard from the lips of the Field Marshal during the London conversations. When this draft, modified only in detail, appeared before the full Commission, I proposed that some well-known writer of good English—such as Mr. Archibald MacLeish, who was attending the Conference — should be asked to redraft and re-invigorate the Preamble. However, the text as formally approved remained very much as it had been, and the chance that the Charter should be prefaced by a statement of aims to which men and women everywhere might respond was lost. The Purposes of the United Nations and the Principles by which the organization will be guided in its efforts to accomplish these purposes, as now set out in the Charter, show an improvement on the original Dumbarton Oaks proposals, largely as a result of the insistence of delegates of several smaller nations. These in particular stressed that the purposes and principles of the organization should be set forth with the utmost clarity and positiveness in order that they might be understood by all to be the international rules of conduct to which member States should be bound to conform. It was the view of the New Zealand Government that the Dumbarton Oaks proposals were defective in this respect, and it remains our opinion that the defects have not been fully removed, though they have been remedied to an appreciable extent. In an endeavour to effect improvements, and in accordance with the line of argument which I had used in the Plenary Session, the New Zealand delegation vigorously advanced, in the first instance, the suggestion that the statement of Purposes and Principles should be so extended as to include, as a positive aim of the Organization,