AVIATION AND EMPIRE
SIR,—Your leading article showed an appreciation of the importance of the future of civil aviation, but a lack of character, which the Viceroy- elect has defined as knowing what one wants and having the courage and determination to get it. We must know what we want and have the courage and determination to get it, even to face cries of " Imperialism" from American interests and our own intelligentsia.
As you say, " it is common ground that a country is fully justified in confining such internal services to companies owned and managed by its own citizens." This is equally true of the routes between different parts of the Empire, to which the control of its air services is more vital than it can be to any single country. We must operate our own services, using the experience of both the Dominions and India as well as England's, and we cannot allow the control of these arterial routes to get in other hands, however friendly. The Dominions must run their own services, a matter in which you would presumably agree, to judge from the above quotation.
It is in the matter of colonial services that you seem so extraordinarily • hesitant. It is our duty to provide the Colonies with adequate services linked to the world routes. Specious pleas of international control and goodwill are merely excuses, which must not be tolerated, for declining to" carry out our responsibilities. Clearly it would be advisable to appoint a body to co-ordinate and develop these different services. As Mr. H. V. Hodson pointed out in 1937 in The Empire in the -World, p. 227: " The least that is needed is a body equal in status and power to the Imperial Shipping Committee to deal with problems of air communica- tions within the Empire, and between Empire countries and the rest of the world, from a wide Commonwealth standpoint."—I am, Sir, your
The fact that goods made of raw materials in short supply owing to war conditions are advertised in this tournal should not be taken as an indication that they are necessarily available for export.
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