The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 1911. THE IMPERIAL CONFERENCE.

Dominion, Volume 4, Issue 1135, 24 May 1911, Page 6

The Dominion. WEDNESDAY, MAY 24, 1911. THE IMPERIAL CONFERENCE.

Nobody who has given any real attention to the course of Imperial affairs since 3907 expects that the Imperial Conference will lead to any very great practical changes in existing inter-Imperial relations. There are, we know, many hopeful people who, mistaking mental" activity for thought, have been led by tho steady and unending flood of discussion upon the Empire's affairs to believe that the Empire is in a general state of flux, and that the Conference will be the crystallising process that will leave us with new shapes in every direction. Fortunately the historical sense is_ still ovcrrnasteringly strong in British statesmen where the very large issues are concerned and also in the statesmen of the older colonies. There is no more reason to expect that any greater change of a fundamental sort will come from this Conference, than came from the Conference of 1907. There is room, of course, for adjustments and standardisations which, important in their own actual results, arc extremely unimportant when compared with the larger changes that uninstructed minds, of whom Sir Joseph •m D ™ the typc ' t!link I" ite foible, lhe two largest questions, in the broad sense, that will be discussed are the Declaration of London a -i rr, s "gg° st ed "Imperial Council of State." The first of these, which is raised upon the motion of the Australian Government, is a question of high practical import to the exporting colonies, but the real gravity of its discussion by tho Conference lies in its relation to the general issue of the extent to which colonial opinion shall direct the foreign policy of Britain. That issue cannot bo excluded from the discussion upon Mr. Fisher's resolution. We have constantly held that it will be a losing policy for the colonics and for the Empire to admit the right of comparatively helpless allies, as the colonics are, to determine the shape, without.being able to support the consequences, of the dominant partner's relations with the independent Powers. It is to the consideration of this question more than to that of any other on the long agenda paper that students of Imperial development will look for light and instruction.

Sir Joseph Ward's—it is not New Zealand's—proposal that an "Imperial Council of State" should be established is assured of full discussion, but it-is assured of rejection also. We have so often discussed the objections—local and Imperial, practical and Constitutional—to this scheme, and to the larger and wilder schemes of an Imperial Federal Parliament and an Imperial Parliament of Defence—that we need not go into any close criticism again just now. It may be as well,' however, to say a word or. two upon a point that, maj lead to some confusion a little later on. In a well-known dispatch, dated April. 20, 1905, Mr.. Alfred Lyttelton, then Secretary of State for the Colonies, recited the/ history of the Colonial Conferences from the first assombly in 1887, and showed that these Conferences had, "step by step, assumed a more definite shape and acquired a more continuous status." It might be said, he went on, that "an_ Imperial Council for the discussion of matters which concern alike.tho United Kingdom and the self-governing colonics has grown into existence by a natural process." The British Government therefore suggested that the title of "Colonial Conferences" should be discarded and the term "Imperial Council" substituted. The intention, as subsequent paragraphs of the dispatch made clear, was merely that the idea of continuity, regularity and establishment should be conveyed in the name—that the idea of occasional and unrelated meetings should be superseded by the idea of a permanent institution meeting every few years. The change in the name was in no way to involve any change whatever in the existing facts and arrangements. Indeed, Mr. Lyttelton was careful to say:

His Majesty's Government doubt whether it would be wise or necessary to give by any instrument to this Council a inoro formal character, to define more closely its Constitution, or to attempt to delimit its functions. Tho history of Anglo-Saxon institutions, such as Parliament or tho Cabinet system, seems to show that, an institution may often bo wisely left to develop in accordance with circumstances, ami, as it were, of its own accord, and that it is well not to sacrifice elasticity- of power of adaptation to prematura defiuiteness of form. This was the view of a Unionist Government. British Liberal principles would require an even stronger repudiation of the idea of a rigid instrument, and it is pretty safe to say that Mr. Asquith's guarded reply last week to . tho deputation that urged Sir Joseph Ward's idea upon him is indicative of strong opposition to that idea.

Nobody is likely to dispute our assertion that the position of New Zealand on this and other issues to be raised at the Conference may be stated briefly as follows: the great majority of those who really think about the problems of Empire are undesirous of any fundamental change in intcr-Impcrial relations, and the vast bulk of the public neither know nor care very much about those problems at all.' The people of New Zealand are in the unfortunate position of being unrepresented, in any true sense, at the Conference. Tliey have received no encouragement froni the Government to think on Imperial affairs; Parliament was denied any opportunity to discuss the impending Conference. The Prime Minister simply drafted a list of resolutions in a hurry, threw them on the table, confined himself to the occasional utterance', between January and March, of empty platitudes like those cabled to us from London today, and then went away only to propound some incoherent and fantastic scheme in Sydney. It is satisfactory to feel that we may look with confidence for results in the way of improved means of communication of all kinds within the Empire and that is the first need of the moment.