IMPERIAL OUTLOOK.

Taranaki Daily News, 5 January 1916, Page 6

IMPERIAL OUTLOOK.

A GIGANTIC TASK. AMERICA'S LAPSE. London, 19th November. •In a speech at one of tho Rhodes lectures. of the University of London, Lord Rosebery spoke of the immensity of the task, which will follow the peace, of reorganising the British Empire. Referring first to the settlement, he said:— "Of course, it is a truism to say that the signature of Germany, or, as I would rather say, Prussia, to any instrument of any kind will have lost all value for any measurable distance of time which we can contemplate. But it is also true that this general distrust must go beyond Prussia, because,\after what we have seen happen in the last fifteen months, no nation wil Ifeel itself safe which bases its apprehension of peace on anything but some material guarantee of its own, which, in the long vista, means force.

"I do not know anything more discouraging than the announcement that lias recently been made by the one great State in the world which is so remote and so powerful that one might think it might free itself from the hideous and bloody burden of war. I know of nothing more disheartening than the announcement that the United States oi America is about to embark upon a huge Armada, destined to be equal or second only to our own. This means that the burden will continue on all other nations, and be increased exactly in proportion to the fleet of the United States.

I confess it is a disheartening prospect that the United States, so great and intelligent a country, so happily remote from European conflicts, should voluntarily in these days take up a burden which, after the war, will be found almost to have broken our backs."

IMPERIAL FEDERATION, Lord Rosebery attended the Intercolonial Conference at Sydney, in which he confessed he feared the French in the Pacific rather than the Germans, and he continued:— "The Imperial Federation League was founded by W. E. Forster, I should think more than forty years ago, and it did excellent work in the way of drawing together the colonies, as they were then called, and the Mother Country. We had meetings both with the colonists and with tlio Home statesmen, and the result was eminently fruitful, but at last our more impatient spirits began to urge that we should submit a constitutional plyi for the government of the Empire in a definite form to the judgment of the public. Those who agreed with me were mortally opposed to this. We did not think it was right or the privilege of a private society to attempt anything so gigantic, and at that time we had a very strong impression, some of us, that any proposal of that kind should come from what are now the Dominions, and not from the Mother Country. I am rather disposed to think that, with the flux of time and the experiences of the war, that judgment may be reversed, and that the proposal should come from the Mother Country to the Dominions to come into her councils, and share her responsibility as regards her foreign policy. However, that only shows what progress the question has made. "I was in Canada in 1873, and in Australia in 1883, and I am bound to say that in 1873 and 1883, both in Canada and in Australia, the Imperial sentiment was a very pale shadow of what it is now\ I think that if our hotter spirits had been able to influence the Government of this country and to have persuaded it to invite the colonies, as they were then, to come and share the government of the Empire, they would have met with some unpleasant rejoinders. Thtire wis this very prime consideration in (he matter, that the Mother Country was then providing for the whole defence of the Empire, and the inhabitants of the Dominions, then much more sparse and poorer than they are now, were extremely reluctant to share the white man's burden, and feared that might be their destiny if called upon to iake part in the government of the Empire.

INTO THE BREACH. "All this has changed. They have leaped into the arena of their own accord. They have fought under the Imperial flag with a heroism that has almost surpassed that of our own sons in this war. But the blood they have shed on our behalf must, in its consequences, change the constitution of the Empire. I am not now talking about an ideal House of Commons and proportional representation, a dummy which is practically impossible. I do not care what form it is going to take. Our constitution is, after all, in the technical sense, a mere ruin. There are so many breaches in the walls that there is ample opportunity for rebuilding when we can find the architect. 'I cannot doubt that when the arduous efforts of the Peace Congress are over—an awful task, surpassing a dozen conferences of Vienna—when that task is over, there will appear higher peaks behind mountain summits, there will appear the almost gigantic task of 'reorganising the British Empire. We have not hitherto been very elastic in our constitutional dealings, but we shall •have— I almost liesitatte to say what I am going to say, because I am quoting words of my own —we shall to clean a good deal off our slate before we begin to write the new organisation of the .Empire upon it. God grant that wisdom and power may bo given to our statesmen in that day, whenever it may come, that the patriotism of the outer Dominions may be shown as much in those bloodless councils as it has been in the fields of the Dardanelles and Flanders.' 1