Family Council

A family council had been called. Mrs. John Curtin, who has never been outside Australia, said last week in Canberra that she was going to London (via the U.S.) with her Prime Minister husband. Then came word from Auckland that New Zealand's Prime Minister, able Scot-born Peter Fraser, was on "the eve of his departure." No word came from Pretoria, South Africa, but no such council would be complete without Field Marshal Jan Christiaan Smuts, the British Commonwealth's elder statesman.

In his attic study at Ottawa's Laurier House, Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King worked quietly and alone, clearing his desk. Soon he, too, would leave for London to join the other Commonwealth Ministers in their first meeting since World War II began.

One Against Many? For Mr. King, in his 70th year, this meeting will present both an opportunity and a crisis. It is an opportunity for him to convert the other Dominions to his vision of the future: an all-embracing system of world security resting on the support of all states, large and small. In pledging Canada to such an ideal, and placing that ideal ahead of Canada's obligations to the Commonwealth, Mr. King set his Dominion out as the champion of small states and against a world dominated by a few great powers.

He also set the stage for a crisis in Canada's relations with the other Dominions, which tend to put Commonwealth power & unity first.

At home, Mr. King's determined effort to shape the new world satisfies an emergent, self-confident Canada's sovereign aims. His position squares with 1) Canada's claims to a seat on future Pan American councils, 2) the fierce intranationalism of ardently isolationist French Canada, which has always supported Mr. King's noncommittal policy toward the Commonwealth. But the Prime Minister has a ticklish question to answer: Does his policy square with the tide of Commonwealth opinion running strongly in Britain and the other Dominions? Balance for Britain? In Britain, no less than in Canada, there is a strong belief that the Commonwealth & Empire can prosper best in a worldwide economic and political system. But Britons, tried and worn by war, share Jan Smuts's strongly expressed concern for their home island, confronting a world in which Russia and the U.S. will be both powerful and power-conscious. And they look to the Dominions, joined in a common policy with Britain, to balance the world scales in Britain's favor. Thus Canada's attitude is supremely important to Britain.

In the Dominions "down under," where the invader was stopped uncomfortably close to the home grounds, there has been less talk of world order and much more of immediate security. In their Canberra Agreement last January, Messrs. Fraser and Curtin proposed to build a great Pacific arc around New Zealand and Australia, pledged a common, regional policy within the Commonwealth.

Australians, twice committed to foreign wars along with Britain, increasingly insist that the whole Commonwealth should share in the making of British policy. Prime Minister Curtin has suggested an ambulant Empire Council with a permanent secretariat to frame policies. Lord Halifax, one of Britain's senior statesmen, was closer to Australian than to Canadian Government opinion when he suggested a common policy in which the Commonwealth would speak "not by a single voice but by the unison of many."

To all proposals for a common, long-term policy, Mr. King has flatly said No. But he will probably go along with his fellow Ministers at the London conference on near-term questions.

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