A GRAND RECEPTION

New Zealand Times, Volume LIII, Issue 12613, 25 November 1926, Page 6

A GRAND RECEPTION

We are glad of the reception accorded by the British Press—metropolitan and provincial—to the outcome of the Imperial Conference. We are, at the same time, proud to have taken the same line without any knowledge of the views of our Imperial contemporaries. The pride is not personal. Its basis is the pleasure of finding ourselves in unanimously Imperial company. About the main result of the Conference—the definite expression of informal understanding of recent years—we need add nothing to what we said in our reference to the principal point of the matter. We will only add that, so far back as the early years of the nineteenth century, there were definite aspirations after a colonial policy which, while establishing British colonies, looked forward to their ultimate autonomy under the Crown. The aspiration endured through the passing years. Many theories were raised against it as a thing impossible. But the aspirations grew stronger, and this increasing force swept aside as impossible the many demands for a formal written Federal Constitution.

The establishment of what one writer of the day calls an Imperial League of Nations, completely autonomous and serving the King, regarding him as the symbol of the unbreakable bond of union, is the work of the Conference, which has given definite form to the long-established understanding. But in this establishment there is no cause for surprise. What has happened is that the tacit understanding has become vocal. Nothing like this has happened in the history of the world. This may be the reason that none of the great empires of history has endured.

Ireland supplies a powerful support to the general optimistic conclusion—as powerful, at least, as that voiced so unequivocally by the Boer Prime Minister, General Hertzog. Ulster, naturally, is asking whether the changed status of the King affects her. Now, Ulster is part of the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland, the Free State part of Ireland belonging to the Empire, and the King is sovereign of both. We cannot see the possibility of difficulty in the new position; such difficulty as could upset the optimistic, most sensible analysis of the “Times” Dublin correspondent. /