INTERESTING EXPERIMENT

Daily Telegraph (Napier), Volume 59, Issue 261, 6 December 1930, Page 4

INTERESTING EXPERIMENT

By the appointment of Sir Isaac Isaacs, lately Chief Justice, to be Governor-General of Australia, the Commonwealth becomes tlie seat of an interesting experiment so far as the British Dominions are concerned. His Majesty the King has, for the fii'st time, acted solely on the advice of a Doniinion Governmenfc, and for the first time tie has been advised to appoinfc a citizen of the Gommonwealth itself. The possibility of the second changb was, of course, implicit ih the first. The function of adviee being once transferred from the Ministers of the Crown at Home to the Ministers bf the Crown in the several dominions, there coiild be no question of limiting it in any new way. Frime Minister ScuIIih had to be as frfee as Mr Bamsay MacDonald. To avoid the ctangers of this freedom by7 eohtracting it would have been to rob it of all the signifioance which, in the new conce'ption of the Empire and of Imperial relations, it is intehded to benr; but that is not to say that they eafinot or ought not to be avoided. Manv people will feel — many Australians do feel— ihat although a Dominion Government might sometimes be quite safe in advising the King to appoint ohe of its own citizens, this would be exceptional good fortuhe. Sueh good fortune, no doubt, is Australia 's now. It would, at least, be difficult to think ^>f any' other Australian who has reached such an eminence as Sir Isaae Isaacs and stands as clear as he does of political attachments. But if the King's advisers in a dominion were to persuade themselves that they should always mahe a domestio choice, on principle, they would he narrowing their own freedom \^ry dangerouslv. Nobody needs to have it explained to liim that the office of GovernorGeneral is politically useful in the widest sense, covering' national and Imperial politics, because it is nonpolitical. The King has no politics ; neithei* has his personal representative. But it is .exceedingly rare in any dominion to find a citizen who has no partv allegianees or sympathies, or who could slied them and be wholeheartedlv believed to have sbed them on the instant of his being appointed Govemor-Genei-al, whether by the advice of Ministers belonging to his own partv or to some other. But ahxietv in this resuect, while it is widslv ad-

mitted, should riot be too deep, since it is anxiety over a possibilify which a little good sense will avoid ; and good sense is not yet extincfc in anv dominion. Nor should it, even when deeplv felt, blind anybody (o the fact that the constitutional change which has been made was a naturnl and necessarv consequence of defining the status of tlie dominions in the new terms of I02B. The slightlv hewildered reluctance with which New Zealand has accepted its independeiifc status ih the Empire, ahd its unqualified and well-justified satisfaction with the old conditions, uhder which its Governors-Gen'eral have been appointed, and with the appointments themselves, are not arguments against a eonstitutional advance which was bound to come and which registers the living growth of the Empire.