NEWS OF THE WEEK
MR. CURTIN, the Australian Prime Minister, has been making some interesting and important suggestions about the future of the British Commonwealth and the need of machinery for ensuring closer collaboration between the United Kingdom and the Dominions. He thinks that, just as we have been able to collaborate in war through the Pacific War Council, so we ought to have means of collaborating in time of peace ; and he suggests the setting up of an Empire Council, with a permanent secretariat, which should meet regularly, sometimes in London, sometimes in the Dominions. The part, that the British Commonwealth should play in the world after the war certainly calls for concerted policy and adequate means for con- tinuous consultation ; and experience has shown that unity need be none the less real because each of the Governments concerned is a fully autonomous body respolisible only to its own people. But Mr. Curtin, it is to be hoped, exaggerates the danger of economic war. If our plans of reconstruction do not go hopelessly awry the rigours of economic war will have been lessened, and it is surely our role now to urge that the co-operation between the nations of the Empire is a model for co-operation which we hope will become general among the United Nations and other nations that are like-minded. Freer trade throughout the world is one of the major aims of peace, and the solidarity of the British Commonwealth should be a means of forwarding that aim. A Commonwealth Secretariat in London or elsewhere might have a useful function to perform, but the dis- advantages of attempting tp force anything like federalism would far outweigh any possible advantages. What do the federation find so seriously wrong with the Commonwealth as it is?
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