Legal Equals

Two days after the Coronation, Stanley Baldwin hastily cleared a table in Queen Anne's Drawing Room in St. James's Palace for an Imperial Conference with the four gentlemen who are his legal equals. New Zealand's Laborite Prime Minister Michael Joseph Savage, South Africa's General James Barry Munnik Hertzog, Australia's Joseph Aloysius Lyons and Canada's William Lyon Mackenzie King under the 1931 Statute of Westminster are just as much the King-Emperor's advisers as England's Baldwin. Invited also was Ireland's gaunt Eamon de Valera, who refused to attend. In Dublin's St. Stephen's Green day after the Coronation a Republican bomb blew the 178-year-old statue of George II off his horse, ripped off both bronze arms.

The four loyal Prime Ministers had just been gratified by the first Coronation ceremony (see col. 3) in history which featured separate oaths by the King for each Dominion. And King George had received them all at Buckingham Palace with equal deference (see cut). Colleague Baldwin was now anxious to capitalize that equality by letting them share his biggest headache: Britain's $7,500,000,000 bill for Rearmament.

This was only one of three items on the agenda for the Conference, others being "Constitutional Questions" and "Trade, Shipping, and Air Communications." Mr. Baldwin, Imperial Conferences being the delicate things they are, had to bide his time. First Canada's King wanted to know what Great Britain intended to do about the preferential trade agreements signed between the Dominions and the mother country at the Imperial Conference at Ottawa in 1932. Since then Canada has signed a reciprocal trade treaty with the U. S. and Secretary Hull has been pressing Stanley Baldwin with requests for a reciprocal treaty with Great Britain, a maneuver which would drive a disrupting wedge into Ottawa's "Buy Empire" philosophy. Also on Secretary Hull's list are Australia, whose unfavorable trade balance with the U. S. has lately been relieved by increased sales of wool, and South Africa, whose recent boom was largely financed by the U. S. Treasury's gold-buying policy. These, however, were matters for private rather than public haggling.

What Stanley Baldwin wanted from his colleagues was some assurance that they would help meet the expense of arming the Empire. His trump card, the British Navy, has been worth least in Canada, more in South Africa where he hopes to trade on it for a Dominion-supported air force, most of all in New Zealand and Australia. In 26 years, Australia has spent $350,000,000 on naval defense, largely on her nine warships and the defenses of her home ports, facts on which Colleague Lyons cannily harped last week. With the British Navy in the Atlantic and the U. S. Navy in the Pacific, Australia's Lyons avoided talking money and showed that he knew where his guns were actually coming from by plumping last week for a "League of Pacific Powers" bound together by a non-aggression pact.

With these weighty questions broached, the Imperial Conference took a long weekend, South Africa's Hertzog and New Zealand's Savage spending it with Mr. Baldwin at "Chequers." This week the conferees hoped to get down to real business.

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