Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1926. PLATITUDES AND TRUISMS

Evening Post, Volume CXII, Issue 126, 24 November 1926, Page 8

Evening Post. WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 24, 1926. PLATITUDES AND TRUISMS

The principal achievement of "The Silent Conference" has evoked a mass of comment which is on the whole highly favourable but even when it is favourable is bewildering in its variety. That as a literary composition the Report on InterImperial Relations is worthy of its reputed author, Lord Balfour, and will take a high place among State documents is clear, nor even if, after the enthusiasm of the moment has cooled, it is ultimately recognised as a triumph of dialectics rather than of statesmanship will he be justly blamable. He had to cut has coat according to his cloth. In the preparation of the Report his function was that not of a benevolent despot but of a draftsman. As a draftsman Lord Balfour had to express the mind of the Conference, and the fact that the Conference was of more minds than one made the task no sinecure. That he has nevertheless devised a solution which satisfies Mr. Mackenzie King and General Hertzog that they have got all they needed, while MrJ Coates and Sir Francis Bell are presumably satisfied that'nothing essential has been sacrificed, is undoubtedly a great performance. Mr. Lloyd George himself, that' versatile explorer of "avenues" and '•ingenious contriver of formulae for patching up the difference between "Yes" and ."No," can surely have nothing better to his credit in the field of either international or industrial diplomacy.

But the. analogy, illustrates the limitations of the draftsman's powers. He cannot bridge the gap between Yes and No, between north and south, or between words and things; -he can only seem to do so." The success of Lord Balfour's formulae in producing the appearance of unanimity is due even less to clever phrasing than to the elimination of essentials. The dialectics of -status cannot really carry us very far. The control of foreign policy is just as much the "articulus stantis aut cadentis Imperii"—the acid test by which the Empire will stand or fall —as the local autonomy to which Mr. Asquith applied the phrase at the Imperial Conference of 1911. Foreign policy has indeed become of infinitely greater importance, for local autonomy has long been accepted as an axiom and is as safe as the equator, but local irresponsibility in-regard to foreign affairs is already a grave danger to the Empire, and if under the encouragement of Lord Balfour's phrases the present apathy of all the Dominions is exchanged by some of them for rash and! independent experiment in this field it may easily prove fatal. It must therefore be confessed that the sweeping censure of the Labour Party's organ comes nearer to the mark than most of the equally sweeping .eulogies which the Report seems to have received from a majority of its contemporaries. The "Daily Herald," we are told, characterises the Ecport as a masterpiece of evasion which produced a few high-sounding phrases, and advised changes in the formulae, but avoided every real problem which arises from the present anomalous relations between Britain and the Dominions. As it is to the responsibilities of foreign policy and the control of it as exemplified at the Conferences of Lausanne and Locarno that the restiveness of Canada has been chiefly due, and to a smaller extent that of SoutH Africa also, a harmonising formula which does not touch foreign policy, but by the implications of its unqualified stress on equality may aggravate the difficulty, is certainly very far from a panacea. It is the main one of these easy successes which can always be obtained by the elimination of the. inconvenient. The most comprehensive and the most judicial of the cabled criticisms is that of the "Times." The balance of its pronouncement is quite worthy of the national status which it has recently recovered. Describing the Report as "essentially a register of existing conditions rather than a programme of the future," the "Times" does not nevertheless deny its value. It is, the'article proceeds, a courageous, ingenious, and comprehensive document, probably unparalleled, but it is wrong to say that, it is ii new departure or a far-r&aeliing Constitutional I

experiment. There is hardly a statement of definition not coinciding with familiar practice. The preamble, for instance, includes a description of the Empire in language only saved by the italics being almost incidental. It may have uses for quotation to suspicious Nationalists, but that is all. What the italicised words are our reports have not informed us, but the value even of platitudes and truisms is not to be overlooked if they may serve for "quotation to suspicious Nationalists." The change in the King's title, to which a quite exaggerated importance was attached by our first message, is then dismissed as "trifling," and rightly so. "King of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland and of the British Dominions Beyond the Seas" became a misnomer when the Irish Treaty gave the Free State Home Rule and added it to the Dominions. This fact is to be duly recognised by die deletion of the words "United Kingdom," though whether the insertion of "Northern" before "Ireland" would not have been a better solution may possibly be open to argument. The change in the status of Gov-ernors-General is regarded by the "Times" as of more importance, but it adds that "what matters enormously is the development of a system of personal contact between London and the Dominion capitals," and the prominence which the Report gives to this "practical necessity" is deservedly commended. But the comment of the "Times" on the glaring omission to which we have referred as justifying in large measure the verdict of the "Daily Herald" is confined to a single searching sentence: —;Are we a single unit for purposes of diplomacy or half-a-dozen units? Upon that fateful question the Report throws no light at all. The "Daily News" is nevertheless satisfied that "the general effect envisages a closer unity and greater inherent strength." To an eye undazzled by Lord Balfour's eloquence it may rather seem to "envisage" disintegration unless some check to the tendencies which it formulates and glorifies is provided by the resolutions which have yet to see the light. .