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25 May, 1911] Imperial Council. [2nd Day. Sir EDWARD MORRlS —cont. that it would be practically of no value. You have in the first place to consider that you have an Empire representing something like 500 millions of people. We know when you give them a fair representation on that Council the oversea Dominions, as they are termed, will have but a very small say in the matter. I, of course, make this statement with the very highest respect for Sir Joseph Ward, and remembering, of course, the very large interests he represents as compared with the interests I represent. The PRESIDENT : I should inform the Conference, for I promised to do so, that I received some weeks ago a memorial signed by a very large number of the Members of the Imperial House of Commons —I think something like three hundred, belonging to various parties in the State (it was not at all confined to one body)—which was in these terms : " We, the undersigned Members of Parliament, representing various political parties, are of the opinion that the time has arrived to take practical steps to associate the oversea Dominions in a more practical manner with the conduct of Imperial affairs, if possible, by means of an established representative council of an advisory character in touch with public opinion throughout the Empire." I promised to communicate that resolution to the Conference, and at the same time I informed the gentlemen who were srood enough, on behalf of the signatories, to present it to me, that while His Majesty's Government had the strongest sympathy with any practical step for bringing into closer communication the Imperial and oversea Governments, yet when it came to anything in the nature of the settin?-up of new political or constitutional machinery, a condition precedent must be that the chancrp, had the unanimous consent of the Dominions themselves, and the gentlemen who represented the memorialists concurred, or appeared to me to concur, in that view. At the same time I think it only riffht and proper that the Conference should be aware that such a memorial was presented. Does it not also show how much easier a thins , it is to express an abstract aspiration for something , in the nature of closer political union than to translate that aspiration into practical terms \ Sir Joseph Ward, in a speech the ability and interest of which we all acknowledge, which must and undoubtedly did represent the expenditure of a great deal of time and thought, has presented us with a concrete proposition, but it is a proposition which not a single representative of any of the other Dominions, nor I as representing for the time being , the Tmperial Government, could possibly assent to. For what does Sir Joseph Ward's proposal come to? I might describe the effect of it without going- into details in a couple of sentences. It would impair, if not altogether destroy, the authority of the Government of the United Kingdom in such grave matters as the conduct of foreign policy, the conclusion of treaties, the declaration and maintenance of peace, or the declaration of war. and, indeed, all those relations with Foreign Powers, necessarily of the most delicate character, which are now in the hands of the Imperial Government, subject to its responsibility to the Imperial Parliament. That authority cannot be shared, and the co-existence side by side with the Cabinet of the United Kingdom of this proposed body—it does not matter by what name you call it for the, moment —clothed with the functions and the iurisdiction which Sir Joseph Ward proposed to invest it with, would, in our judgment, be absolutely fatal to our present system of responsible government. That is from the Imperial point of view. Now, from the point of view of the Dominions. I cannot do better than repeat in my own words what was said by Sir Wilfrid Laurier. So far as the Dominions are concerned, this new machine could impose upon the Dominions by the voice of a body in which they would be in a standing- minority (that is part of the oaseV in a small minority indeed, a policy of which they mierht all disapprove, of which some of them at any rate Dossiblv and probably would disapprove, a policy which would in most cases, involve expenditure, and an expenditure which would have to be met by the imposition on a dissentient community of taxation by its own Government. We cannot, with the traditions and the history of the British Empire behind us, either from the point of view of the United Kingdom, or from the point of view of our self-governing Dominions, assent for a moment to proposals which are so fatal to th<* very fundamental conditions on which our Empire has been built up and carried on. Therefore, with the highest possible respect, as

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