Important Business Pending

Canada had important business pending with her sister Dominion, the Union of South Africa. What the business was, the astute East Block (Canadian equivalent of the U.S. State Department) did not say. But to handle it the Dominion last week assigned one of her ablest constitutional lawyers. He is shrewd, friendly Charles J. Burchell, who left a rich practice in his native Nova Scotia to enter Canada's diplomatic service in 1939. Until last week he was High Commissioner in war-important Newfoundland; before that, the first High Commissioner to Australia.

Westminster v. Smuts. Back in 1929 Lawyer Burchell helped draft the historic Statute of Westminster, which defined the British Dominions' status as free and sovereign nations, united only in common allegiance to the Crown. Now he was going to the home of a man who has been talking a new and tighter Commonwealth policy: Jan Christiaan Smuts.

With the evident approval of the men who govern Britain, Elder Statesman Smuts sees the Empire of the future more closely united on policy, open to association with other European nations (TIME, Dec. 13). Such a Commonwealth might become the British counterweight to Russia and the U.S. in a future world.

About such a policy the occupants of Ottawa's East Block have evident misgivings. The principal one is that the stresses & strains of any centralized policy for an Empire of widely different peoples and interests might well split the Commonwealth asunder. Canada's new High Commissioner, able Lawyer Burchell, is just the man to explain the East Block's views to Elder Statesman Smuts.

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