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Vancouver. August, 1936.

I should like to say a few words to you today upon a subject which is in a sense political, but which is also beyond party politics, that British Empire of which we are a part. I come here at a time when Vancouver is proudly conscious of her past and confident of her future; but both that past and that future are closely linked, not only with the Dominion of Canada, but with our great British Commonwealth of Nations. I do not know how you feel, but if you are like me, recent events up and dovm the world will have puzzled you a little and made you wonder what the future is likely to hold. But before we can speculate about the future we must be clear about the present. What exactly does the British Empire mean today?

You must have often reflected how the whole theory of the Empire has been revolutionised during the lifetime of many of us? Let me give you my own experience. When I was a young man at Oxford I thought of the Empire chiefly as a fitting subject for Lord Rosebery's eloquent perorations and Mr. Kipling's stirring poetry. I thought of it chiefly as a Godgiven arena in which adventurous young men could show their quality. I knew very little about the Dominions, for that was before the time of the Rhodes Scholarships, and we had not many Dominion students at Oxford, though the few that we had were exceedingly popular. I remember seeing the Colonial Premiers when they were over for the Diamond Jubilee and came to Oxford to get degrees, and thinking of them as honest gentlemen who, in remote parts of the world, under considerable difficulties, were maintaining British traditions. At that time I thought of Britain as mattering a good deal to the overseas Empire, but not of that Empire as mattering much to Britain.

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Then I went to South Africa in the middle of the Boer War. There several things happened to me. I met many soldiers from the Dominions and discovered how much we had to learn from them. I came under the spell of Cecil Rhodes' dreams and felt the imaginative grandeur of his conception - a conception, let me say, far wiser and more liberal than most people at the time realised. Then Lord Milner's influence gave me a new political creed. I began to feel that the Empire was the real unit and not Britain, and that the future of our race lay in its wise development.

At that time we all believed in Imperial Federation. Lord Milner believed in it; Joseph Chamberlain, who was then by far the greatest figure in Imperial politics, believed in it passionately. But I remember that quite early I began to have my doubts as to whether any scheme of federation would work. I felt that federation was only possible when each unit had reached its full national development, and that that time was not yet. Any premature federal scheme would have crippled that progress towards self- conscious nationality in the Dominions, which was the first thing needful.

Then Sir Wilfrid Laurier began to emphasise his doctrine of Colonial natiohalism, and I became a complete convert. I remembered Mazzini's words, "Every people has its special mission and that mission constitutes its nationality." The self-governing Dominions had to work out their special mission, and any premature attempt at federal bonds would have crippled them in their task.

Well, you know what has happened since. We had the Dominions Prime Ministers sitting in the War Cabinet as colleagues of the British Prime Minister. The War left us with a new conception of

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Empire, as an alliance of sovereign States bound together only by a common allegiance to the Throne. The Balfour Definition in 1926 put this new conception into formal terms, and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 worked out its legal implications. The Empire now is an alliance of sovereign States - no more and no less. That is a doctrine which fits the facts. I wonder if you realise how great a part Canada has played in its making? I think it may fairly be said that our new Imperial theory is principally the work of Canada - first foreshadowed by Sir Wilfrid Laurier, then emphasised by Sir Robert Borden during and immediately after the War, and finally supplemented by the work of the present Prime Minister of Canada at the 1926 Conference. Canada has every reason to be interested in the new Empire, for it is largely her creation.

What, then, is the British Empire today? It is in two parts - first the Colonies directly administered by Britain and largely inhabited by peoples who are of another race than our own; second an alliance of sovereign Dominions, which in the main are peopled by men of our own blood. I wish to say one thing only about the Colonies. You will have seen in the press a good deal of discussion about the "haves" and the "have nots", the "satiated" and the "hungry" among the nations, those which have been fortunate enough to acquire large Colonial possessions, and those which lack them. Some have talked as if it were Britain's duty, in order to secure the peace of the world, to share out her Colonies among those countries which have none. It has been the common assumption that Britain has won her Colonies merely by a stroke of good fortune, by a lucky gamble, so to speak, upon the international Stock Exchange. I am not going to say anything about our solemn moral responsibilities towards the native peoples under our rule, which makes it

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impossible to talk of handing them about as if they were mere inanimate counters. But I would protest most strongly against the notion that we won our Colonies by a lucky gamble. We have been making our Colonial Empire for three hundred years. Its making has called for a vast expenditure of blood and treasure and national energy. On the balance I doubt if we have made any material gain from our overseas possessions, even from India. They have been a field for the energy and devotion of our people, and they have been won and developed at a gigantic cost. The making of our Colonial Empire was, to my mind, a far greater national effort than, say, the making of modern Germany or the making of Modern Italy. What we have got we have paid for in the fullest pense by expenditure of the human spirit. And I think that on the whole we have shown ourselves unselfish and farsighted in their administration. We have no cause to be ashamed of our record, and there is no one , I am convinced, in Britain or the Dominions, who will ever consent to treat our great network of historic responsibilies as if it were merely a lightly won and idle balance in a speculative bank account.

I turn to the Dominions. They, too, have been created at a great cost - first of all by Britain and then by their own peoples. Remember that they have been created, and have not merely grown by accident. They are a refutation of the shallow view that the only factor that matters in history is the economic. Take canada. Her natural economic outlets were all towards the south, to the United States, but under the impulse of a political ideal she turned westward, defied her geography, pushed on t hrough thousands of miles of rock and forest, and conquered the wilds until she reached the western seas.

What is to be the future of this great alliance? Well, the

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first duty of an alliance is to have some kind of common policy in matters of common concern. We cannot stop short at a mere formal confederation under the Crown. There will arise economic questions and political questions in which the Empire, speaking as a whole, would have infinitely more weight in the world than if Britain and each Dominion spoke with a separate voice. Sooner or later we must devise some apparatus of common action. Indeed, we are already busy at the task. There is a very considerable machinery already existing for common Imperial effort, as a study of the agenda of any Imperial Conference will show.

But here I would venture upon a word of caution. Some of my Imperialist friends, especially in Britain, seem to me to be a little too eager to hurry the pace. They would like to gather all the Dominion statesmen round a table and sit down and work out a plan for an executive alliance in every department of common interest. Well, I do not believe that that would work. That is not the way that the Empire has developed in the past, and it is not the way it will develop in the future. Any attempt now to create a formal organisation for common action would, to my mind, be bound to fail. We must feel our way carefully as the different issues arise. We must solve each problem as it confronts us, and by and by we will find that these solutions will link themselves up into a real mechanism of co-operation. Just as Imperial Federation in Mr. Chamberlain's day would have stunted Imperial development, and might even have wrecked it altogether, so any attempt in our own day to go too fast and to lay down rules in advance before the proper atmosphere is created would not increase, but would gravely impair, Imperial solidarity.

But there is one problem which is always confronting us,