The League of Nations
The Place of the Dominions at Geneva
TILE British Dominions hold a special position in the League of Nations, a position which has played some part in determining
their constitutional relationship to Great Britain and to one another, or, perhaps it would be more accurate to say, which has drawn public attention to a relationship which was, in any case, steadily developing and has in this and other ways been given visible form.
The self-governing Dominions (with the exception of New- foundland and Southern Rhodesia) are, as everyone knows,
completely independent Members of the League. Article I. of the Covenant was indeed specifically framed to give them their special place at Geneva. They are, therefore, at perfect liberty to vote against one another on the rare occasions when a question of voting arises, and in lesser matters they occasionally do. On the other hand, they never forget that they are- members of the same commonwealth, and there is, to that extent, some ground for the suggestion that the British Empire, in effect, commands not one vote but seven in the League Assembly. It is a testimony to the discretion of the British Dominion representatives that that criticism is not more frequently heard than it is.
The Assembly which has just closed showed the various Dominion delegations in an interesting light. Two of the Dominions, the oldest and the youngest, are so placed geographically as to be able to keep in reasonably close touch with Geneva. Canada is only about seven days' distant from the seat of the League, and Ireland not two days. That is a partial, though, no doubt, only a partial, explanation of the interest taken in the League by the Governments at Ottawa and Dublin. They are the only Dominions whose Prime Ministers have sat in the Assembly as Prime Ministers, though Mr. Bruce of Australia was a delegate at Geneva before he took office. This year Canada and the Irish Free State both signalised themselves, and, incidentally, paid tribute to the League, by sending to the Assembly delegations composed entirely of Cabinet Ministers. Canada, indeed, sending to the Assembly her Prime Minister, Mr. Mackenzie King, with Mr. Dunning, the Minister of Railways, and Senator Dandurand the Government spokesman in the Senate, was represented more impressively than any Dominion has ever been before and, relatively speaking, much more impressively than Great Britain this year.
This may come to be recognized as a fact of considerable importance, for Canada is already marking out for herself a special role at Geneva. So far as the British Empire is concerned, she is the senior Dominion, with a longer experience of self-government than any other and with an independence of spirit that has manifested itself in various constitutional innovations, such as the conclusion of the Halibut Treaty and the appointment of Ministers in foreign capitals. Canada, at the same time, so far as the League of Nations is concerned, is the spokesman for North America. No one would suggest that she is in any kind of way dominated by the United States, but she stands sufficiently near to the orbit of United States politics and of United States finance to give her voice a special weight in an Assembly from which the United States is absent.
At this year's Assembly Canada admirably combined the preservation of her own individuality with a general identity of outlook with the other Empire delegations. Mr. Mackenzie King's speech in the Assembly made an excellent impression, the more so since he avoided empty generalities and quoted Canada's own experience of disarmament and arbitration to show how far these two movements could be carried under favourable circumstances. Here, indeed, is a field in which before long different Dominions may be found taking different roads, and their freedom to do that had better be recognised in advance. Signature of the Optional. Clause of the Statutes of the Permanent Court of International Justice may provide a test case. The British Government appears to be still opposed to signing the Clause, and at the last Imperial Con, ference the Dominions all agreed not to sign it without further reference to one another. That is not interpreted as meaning until another Imperial Conference meets. There are other, forms of consultation than that, and statements have been made officially in the Canadian Parliament which show
Canada to be definitely in favour of signature. The Irish Free State is understood to take the same view. More, on the whole, will be gained by individual action in such a case as this than by prolonged discussions designed to secure uniformity of action on the part of all the seven Empire Members of the League. Bloc action at Geneva does not make the best impression.
But to revert to the 1928 Assembly, the more distant Dominions naturally find it difficult to send delegates to Geneva of the same calibre as the Irish or Canadian. Aus- tralia, New Zealand and South Africa are habitually repre- sented by their High Commissioners in London, and Australia regularly sends, in addition, a woman delegate (the Australian representative this year, Mrs. McDonnell, made a particularly good impression) and an active politician. Such Dominions; moreover, inevitably feel to some extent that in its present' phase the League is devoting itself, in the main, to activities in Europe. Their own contacts with the League are primarily
in relation to Mandates. That is true in particular of South Africa and New Zealand, both of whom have had unusually important discussions with the Permanent Mandates Corn- mission, in the one case over South West Africa, in the other over Western Samoa. It may be noted in the latter con-. nection that Sir George Richardson, the Administrator of Western Samoa, who had just been strikingly vindicated by the Mandates Commission, was one of the New Zealand representatives at the Assembly. Both the South African and New Zealand delegates, rather curiously, spoke of intel- lectual co-operation as the most important department of the League's work, and the South African delegate, dwelling on the value of the better type of " League propaganda," said that South Africa had lately instituted a League of Nations Day.
But there are, of course, other contacts. Ur Granville Ryrie, for example, spoke of the importance Australia attaches to an investigation being carried out by the League's Health Organization in certain Pacific Islands, and the delegates for India referred with an equal satisfaction to various activities of the Health and Transit Organizations directly affecting their own country. But India, perhaps, made a more valuable contribution through its criticism than through its apprecia- tion. The Nawab of Palanpur in the first week of the Assembly and Lord Lytton, head of the Indian delegation, on the closing day, both uttered a serious warning against an impression, which they declared was too widely prevalent, that the League was engaged largely in carrying on various activities in Europe with money contributed on a fairly substantial scale from Asia. The Indian Prince indeed went- further than that, and said a conviction existed in many quarters that the League was actually designed to rivet the domination of European nations on Asia. He repudiated any such belief himself, but it is all to the good that such warning notes should be sounded when necessary from the Assembly platform.
The future of the Dominions at Geneva is an interesting question. They obviously have a notable contribution to make as members of a Commonwealth in which something very like an ideal relationship has been established. The idea that individual membership of the League has a separatist effect on the Dominions is completely untenable to anyone who has seen on the spot how that individual membership works in practice. There is often a difference of outlook between different members of the Empire. Australia, for example, was saying this year that the League must not touch tariffs because they were a purely domestic concern; and Ireland was saying it must touch them because they were not. But none of these differences is fundamental. As things are working out in practice, the peculiar posi- tion of the Dominions at Geneva is shown to be good for themselves, good for the League and altogether good for the, Empire.
YOUR GENEVA CORRESPONDENT.
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