The Brothers

The news from London last week was that five Prime Ministers of the British Commonwealth, assembled in their first conference of World War II, had not agreed to play Big-Power politics in the postwar world. Instead, their only agreement so far had been on a scheme which might be a check against Big-Power politics.

Gone by the board, until further notice, were all proposals to solidify Britain and her Dominions in a single, commonly directed power-bloc. Endorsed, at least in principle, was a new League of Nations (details: unannounced). Within a new League, the Dominions might gather around Britain as closely or as loosely as they pleased. But any League worthy of the name would also enable them to choose other friends as well, make it harder for the Big Three (or Four, or Five) to run the world to suit themselves.

In plumping for a League, vaguely defined though it still was, the Prime Ministers had significantly reversed the recent current of Big Three thought.

Family Affair. When the Prime Ministers' conference opened last fortnight, Australia's John Curtin flatly proposed a permanent secretariat of the Common wealth -- in other words, the permanent center of a permanent power-bloc which, so Curtin thought, would insure his country's security in the remote Pacific. Well aware that Canada's Mackenzie King had long opposed the idea, Curtin stubbornly pursued his aim, said: "If I cannot have four brothers, I will make do with three."

New Zealand's Peter Fraser exclaimed: "I'm from Missouri," fell off the fence on Canada's side. Last week Mackenzie King, addressing both Houses of Parliament, did his best to bury centralization. Said he: ". . . In considering new methods of organization to bring the nations of the Commonwealth closer together, we can not be too careful to see that, to our own peoples, the new methods will not appear as an attempt to limit their freedom of decision or, to peoples outside the Commonwealth, as an attempt to establish a separate bloc. ... I am told that, some where, over the grave of one who did not know when he was well off, there is the following-epitaph : 'I was well; I wanted to be better; and here I am.' "

World Affair. As usual, Mackenzie King tied up his objections to Common wealth centralization with his general idea that big powers ought not to dominate the world, and that a strongly centralized Commonwealth would be too prone to play Big-Power politics. Precisely that idea seemed to prevail at the conference last week. A closer-to-home reason for his stand was his conviction that Canada must be in a position to go along with her big neighbor, the U.S., even when the U.S. goes against the British Commonwealth.

Winston Churchill, lately a leading player of Big-Power politics, had cannily declined to commit himself. Publicly, he had neither qualified nor abandoned Britain's belief that she must have the Commonwealth & Empire behind her in order to remain a Great Power. His sage old friend, South Africa's Jan Christian Smuts, came out last year for the strongest possible Commonwealth bloc, as a friendly offset to the U.S. and to "the new colossus," Russia. Last week Smuts kept his counsel about Commonwealth centralization. But when the news of a League plan leaked out, with it came the word that Jan Smuts was its principal sponsor. Perhaps, as in 1919 (see below) he again saw a chance for something better than a power-political world.

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