A QUARTERLY REVIEW OF THE POLITICS OF Volume XIV DECEMBER 1923 TO SEPTEMBER 1924 LIB: THE IMPERIAL CONFERENCE NOTHER Imperial Conference has come to an end. A were a There were actually two Conferences, each with a separate personnel. The Prime Ministers themselves were, strictly speaking, members of the Imperial Conference only. The importance attached to the economic issues under discussion was, however, so great that one or more of them were in constant attendance at the Economic Conference, which in consequence had to confine its sittings to days on which there was no meeting of the Imperial Conference. Such subjects as Imperial preference, moreover, have a political as well as an economic side, and came within the range of both Conferences. The Economic Conference might, indeed, almost have been described as the Imperial Conference sitting in committee on economic subjects. In its composition the Conference had changed since 1921. In that year the chief delegates were the veteran Prime Ministers of the war and General Smuts, who had also been a member of the Imperial War Cabinet, though not himself a Prime Minister at that time. Of these only Mr. Massey and General Smuts were at the Conference. this autumn. The greatest innovation, however, was the separate representation of the Irish Free State, which has become a Dominion since 1921. Some interesting consequences that are likely to follow this particular change were described in our last issue.* For one thing, the balance of population is profoundly affected. The population of the Mother Country used to exceed that of the Dominions by nearly thirty-one millions. Since Ireland, with the * See THE ROUND TABLE, NO. 52, pp. 799-804. exception of six northern counties, has been taken from the United Kingdom and added to the Dominions the excess is little over twenty-four millions. We do not propose here either to describe or to comment on the proceedings of the Conferences. The European crisis, the most baffling of the questions requiring a decision, is discussed elsewhere, while the constitutional question has already been dealt with in our last two numbers. This article is merely intended to introduce the official summary of the proceedings, which we hope to print as an appendix† if it should be available in time for publication. With any conclusions that have been arrived at we propose to deal in a future issue. THE I HE Conference which has just ended is the second regular one since the war. The representatives of the Empire sat continuously at Paris in 1919, as they had sat in London during the war, but their meetings were in both cases of an abnormal character and they dealt with emergencies of an exceptional kind. Neither this Conference nor the Imperial Conference of 1921 was a successor of the Imperial War Cabinet or of the British Empire delegation. They were a resumption of the regular sequence that had been interrupted by the war. The title, "Imperial Conference," itself indicates this. It has no pretensions to be an executive body, such as would be suggested by the term Imperial Cabinet." Its habit has been, according to the Prime Minister of South Africa, even to avoid passing resolutions by a majority. Not that plain speaking is avoided in debate-the discussions on our cattle restrictions and wireless arrangements show that there is plenty of it but the procedure of the Conference has, General Smuts claimed, always been by unanimity, and the famous resolution about the status of Indians which was passed * See p. 13. † See p. 205. in 1921, South Africa dissenting, was the only exception to that course.* When the Imperial Conference met this autumn the problem that confronted it on the constitutional side was that of external relations. The efficacy of the existing system, which left their conduct to Whitehall, depended upon effective inter-Imperial consultation, and for that purpose, as was made clear in our last issue, no sufficient machinery at present exists. The need for the readjustment of inter-Imperial arrangements was recognised as early as 1917, when the Prime Ministers assembled in London resolved that a special Constitutional Conference should be held as soon as possible after the war. That Conference, as our readers will remember, has never been held, because in 1921 it was decided that no advantage could be gained by holding it, "having regard to the constitutional developments since 1917." Those developments have already been described in our pages. The representatives of the Dominions had not only been associated with British Cabinet Ministers on equal terms, first in the conduct of the war and later in the arrangement of the peace. Their new status had been recognised by the resolutions of the Imperial War Cabinet, the British Empire delegation, and the speeches of British statesmen. It is interesting to trace one or two of the steps in this development. In 1917 it was placed on record by the assembled Prime Ministers that any such readjustment (the reference was to the proposed constitutional conference) while thoroughly preserving all existing powers of self-government and complete control of domestic affairs should be based upon full recognition of the Dominions as autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth and of India (it had just been decided that India should be represented at future Imperial Conferences) as an important portion of the same, should recognise the right of the Dominions and India to an adequate voice in foreign relations, and should provide effective arrangements for a continuous It is interesting to note that Canada saw no need for the permanent economic committee which the other delegates at the Economic Conference decided to constitute. Her representatives dissented from the resolution. |