THE IMPERIAL WAR CABINET AND CONFERENCE, 1917.
Left to right (seated): Mr. A. Henderson, Lord Milner, Lord Curzon, Mr Bonar Law, Mr. Lloyd George, Sir Robert Borden, Mr. Massey, and General J. C. Smuts.
Standing (in middle): Sir Satyendra Sinha, the Maharajah of Bikanir. Sir James Meston, Mr. Austen Chamberlain, Lord Robert Cecil, Mr. WaIter Long, Sir Joseph Ward, Sir George Perley, Mr. Rogers and Mr. Hazen.
Standing (back· row): Captain Amery, Admiral Jellicoe, Sir Edward Carson, Lord Derby, General Morris,
Sir M. Hankey, Mr. Lambert, and Major Storr.
GENERAL SMUTS AND THE MAHARAJAH OF BIKANIR RECEIVE THE FREEDOM
OF THE CITY OF LONDON.
Inspecting the Guard of Honour in Guildhall Yard.
SIR ROBERT BORDEN, GENERAL SMUTS, AND THE MAHARAJAH OF BIKANIR RECEIVE THE FREEDOM OF THE CITY OF EDINBURGH, APRIL 11, 1917.
The new freemen leaving the Usher Hall with the 'Lord Provost after the ceremony.
PRESENTATION' OF THE FREEDOM' OF THE CITY OF L0ND0N TO, MINISTERS'OF THE EMPIRE
Seated, on the Lord Mayor's right hand are (reading from left to right) :-Sir Satyendra Prasanna Sinha, Sir James Meston"
Sir Edward Morris (Prime Minister, Newfotlndland), General Smuts, and the Maharajah of Bikanir.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/what-the-war-conference-means-wgznfbx7b
What the War Conference Means
The Dominions have long believed that the time had come for them to take a more direct share in the government of the Empire
January 26, 1917
The statement by the Prime Minister about the War Conference which we publish today was made to an Australian Press representative. But it is addressed to all the Dominions, expounding for their benefit the necessarily vague terms of the invitation to their Prime Ministers. It sets at rest all doubts about the nature of the War Conference, and puts it in the true light as a bold innovation in the war government of the Empire.
The representatives of the Dominions and of India, while they are here, are to “sit in the Executive Cabinet of the Empire.” At its meetings they will have an equal status with British Ministers who are members of the War Cabinet. This, as Mr Lloyd George readily admits, breaks away from all precedent. Only lately have Dominion Ministers even been admitted to meetings of the Imperial Cabinet. When they were admitted they were there to receive information and to give advice. They were not members of the Cabinet itself. Now they are to be full members.
Thus, by a stroke of the pen, the Government has created, if only for a moment of emergency, that Cabinet of the Empire, composed of representatives from all its self-governing States, which has seemed for so long to be a dream of the Imperial visionary. The creation of an Imperial Cabinet, even though its existence is limited to a series of special meetings and though its functions are adjusted to the imperative needs of the war, is, as the Prime Minister says, a proof that the British peoples “have found a unity in the war such as never existed before - a unity not only in history but of purpose.”
The Dominions have long believed that the time had come for them to take a more direct share in the government of the Empire. Since the war they have felt more keenly than ever their divorce from direct responsibility. Now they are asked to assume it. There is no doubt about their reply, once they understand that the invitation is genuine, that it has real business behind it, and is not mere window-dressing.
The Prime Minister’s explanation of the real meaning of the invitation will show them that there is a new spirit abroad in this country. That is all they want to know. The rest can well be left to them. Nonetheless, it is an excellent thing that the work which the War Conference is to do is now set before them in unmistakable terms. The Conference is first and last a war measure. The Prime Minister puts its complete justification into a sentence. “You don’t suppose,” he says, “that the Overseas nations can raise and place in the field armies containing an enormous proportion of their best manhood and not want to have a say, a real say, in determining the use to which they are to be put.”
“Nothing,” in short, “affecting the Dominions, the conduct of the war, or the negotiations of peace will be excluded from its purview.” Once the broad lines of Imperial policy on all these questions are laid down they can be adapted in detail to the shifting exigencies of the moment. Until they have been discussed and determined, at least in outline, by a Cabinet of the Empire, the British peoples can neither develop their full strength for war nor speak with clear unanimity in the councils of the Alliance.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/india-at-the-conference-7thnc3nqf
The Imperial War Conference, which is to sit in the intervals between the meetings of the War Cabinet, began yesterday at the Colonial Office, with the Colonial Secretary as Chairman. The Conference, as we have already explained, is to consider Imperial matters which are outside the direct scope of the War Cabinet.
A singularly fortunate and promising feature of its meetings is the presence of the representatives of India, Sir James Meston, the Maharajah of Bikanir, and Sir S P Sinha. They are not members of the War Cabinet, in which India is represented by its Secretary of State, to whom they act as official advisers. But they are members of the Conference at the Colonial Office, and at this Conference, where the voting is by States, India is to vote through them on equal terms with the Dominions.
Thus for the first time the direct representatives of India sit in an Imperial Conference with the representatives of Great Britain and of the Dominions. In his opening address yesterday the Colonial Secretary rightly laid stress on this development in the composition of the Imperial Conference, He offered a warm welcome to the representatives of India, and his words were echoed with unstinted approval by the Dominion members.
Nothing could be better than this. It had been assumed much too generally in India that the Indian representatives had come to London merely as advisers of the Secretary of State. Yesterday’s proceedings show that their duties, so far as the Imperial Conference is concerned, go much farther. The unanimous approval of the Dominion representatives should also help to take the sting out of the resentment which has grown in India against some of the Dominions. It has been the result of past misunderstandings, which have created much regrettable friction.
There could be no surer safeguard against the continuance of such mischief than the meeting at the Council-board of the Empire of the representatives both of India and of the Dominions together.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-work-of-the-war-conference-70frdpgj3
The resolutions published this morning do not, we need hardly say, represent the whole work of the Imperial and Dominion Ministers who have been at the meetings of the last six weeks. Much of that work has been done at the War Cabinet, and both custom and expediency are against the formal publication of Cabinet decisions. It is possible that they will be communicated to the Empire by means of Ministerial statements, if they are made public at all, just as the gist of the Imperial Preference resolution was published the other day.
We mention this point at the outset because the habitual and necessary reticence of Cabinets about their proceedings is liable, in the case of the War Cabinet which has just finished its work, to obscure its high importance. Ont of sight, out of mind. It will be a very real misfortune if the deep and lasting value of the Imperial War Cabinet is not thoroughly appreciated throughout the Empire. The fact that it met as an Executive Cabinet of the whole Empire is not all, though that, as the King said yesterday, was “a giant stride on the road of progress and Imperial development,” and both the Prime Minister and Sir Robert Borden have suggested that the precedent thus created may be followed and become established in the future. Its immediate results are more to the purpose at the moment. Beyond a doubt they have been valuable to a very high degree. Though it is difficult in the circumstances even to suggest their nature, they can perhaps best be summed up by saying that - saving Australia - the governing mind of each part of the Empire, on questions of war strategy, of the principles of foreign policy, and of peace terms, is a single mind for the first time.
But even this does not do full justice to the results of the meetings of the War Cabinet. The governing mind of the Empire is not only a single mind. It has reached unity by the paths of full knowledge and ample discussion. The complex difficulties of the war and its reactions upon Imperial policy throughout the world have been made known to the representatives of the Dominions and of India. And they, for their part, have been able to explain to Imperial Ministers the special interests which must be kept safe when terms of peace come to be considered.
The War Conference has met pari passu with the War Cabinet, and its special task is well defined in the address which its members presented to the King at Windsor yesterday. It has “considered the steps that may be required to ensure that the fruits of victory may not be lost by unpreparedness in times of peace, and so to develop the resources of the Empire that it may not be possible hereafter for an unscrupulous enemy to repeat his outrages upon liberty and civilization.”
The resolution in favour of Imperial Preference is chief among the recommendations designed to this end. We now have its text, which shows that it includes not only “specially favourable treatment and facilities” by each part of the Empire “to the produce and manufactures of other parts,” but also “arrangements by which intending emigrants from the United Kingdom may he induced to settle in countries under the British flag.” Population, in other words, is the first condition of industrial and commercial development. But there are other safeguards for the prosperity of the Empire as a single economic unit. Thus another resolution of the War Conference recommends “prompt and attentive consideration of the production of an adequate food supply and arrangements for its transportation when and where required”; of “the control of natural resources available within the Empire”; and of “the economical utilization of such natural resources through processes of manufacture carried out within the Empire.”
The Conference has had an eye, too, to the major consideration of naval defence. it requests the Admiralty to work out “immediately after the conclusion of the war what they consider the most effective scheme of naval defence for the Empire,” and to make to the various Governments concerned “such recommendations as [they] consider necessary in that respect for the Empire’s future security.”
But the members of the Conference, very wisely, have not confined themselves to such material considerations. They have gone much farther. The status of India as a partner State of the Empire is now recognized for all time. The wise discretion which ignored the Imperial Conference resolution of 1907, and summoned the representatives of India to take part in the deliberations of the War Cabinet and War Conference of the Empire is now formally ratified. India is to be “fully represented at all future Imperial Conferences.”
There is gratifying evidence, too, that the association of the Dominion and the Indian representatives has had excellent results. The Conference “accepts the principle of reciprocity of treatment between India and the Dominions.” Thus, it may be hoped, there has dawned a new day of understanding as between the Dominions and India.
And, lastly, the War Conference has set its face towards a deliberate consideration of Imperial constitutional problems, It recognizes that “the readjustment of the constitutional relations of the component parts of the Empire is too important and intricate a subject to be dealt with during the war.” But it recommends definitely that their readjustment “should form the subject of a special Imperial Conference to be summoned as soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities.”
These essentials they define as the preservation of full local autonomy; recognition of the right of the Dominions and of India “to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations” and “effective arrangements” for “continuous consultation” and concerted action, where necessary, between the several Governments of the Empire. We need not, for the moment, be too strict to mark controversial points in this classification of the limitations of constitutional readjustment. The great thing is that a special Imperial Conference is to consider the constitutional problem. The rest may be left to the sure influence of time.
The representatives of the Dominions and of India, while they are here, are to “sit in the Executive Cabinet of the Empire.” At its meetings they will have an equal status with British Ministers who are members of the War Cabinet. This, as Mr Lloyd George readily admits, breaks away from all precedent. Only lately have Dominion Ministers even been admitted to meetings of the Imperial Cabinet. When they were admitted they were there to receive information and to give advice. They were not members of the Cabinet itself. Now they are to be full members.
Thus, by a stroke of the pen, the Government has created, if only for a moment of emergency, that Cabinet of the Empire, composed of representatives from all its self-governing States, which has seemed for so long to be a dream of the Imperial visionary. The creation of an Imperial Cabinet, even though its existence is limited to a series of special meetings and though its functions are adjusted to the imperative needs of the war, is, as the Prime Minister says, a proof that the British peoples “have found a unity in the war such as never existed before - a unity not only in history but of purpose.”
The Dominions have long believed that the time had come for them to take a more direct share in the government of the Empire. Since the war they have felt more keenly than ever their divorce from direct responsibility. Now they are asked to assume it. There is no doubt about their reply, once they understand that the invitation is genuine, that it has real business behind it, and is not mere window-dressing.
The Prime Minister’s explanation of the real meaning of the invitation will show them that there is a new spirit abroad in this country. That is all they want to know. The rest can well be left to them. Nonetheless, it is an excellent thing that the work which the War Conference is to do is now set before them in unmistakable terms. The Conference is first and last a war measure. The Prime Minister puts its complete justification into a sentence. “You don’t suppose,” he says, “that the Overseas nations can raise and place in the field armies containing an enormous proportion of their best manhood and not want to have a say, a real say, in determining the use to which they are to be put.”
Thus the tradition that made the British Government responsible for the foreign policy and for the naval and military strength of the whole Empire is to be overborne by the creation of a War Cabinet for the whole Empire. The work of that Cabinet will be dictated by the circumstances of its origin. It is to be a Cabinet for war, and all the conditions, contingencies, and consequences of the war will be within its province. It will review and determine British strategy by sea and land. Its value in this field must, of course, depend entirely; upon the circumstances of its meeting.
War waits for no man, and as its blind tide ebbs or flows the enigmas of one week become the commonplaces of the next. But, this apart, the Conference will have much to do. The Prime Minister gives a rough outline of its work. It will consider “all the difficult problems connected with peace”. as well as “what I may call the preparation for peace” - demobilization, “migration of our own peoples to other parts of the Empire, the settlement of soldiers on the land, commerce and industry after the war.”“Nothing,” in short, “affecting the Dominions, the conduct of the war, or the negotiations of peace will be excluded from its purview.” Once the broad lines of Imperial policy on all these questions are laid down they can be adapted in detail to the shifting exigencies of the moment. Until they have been discussed and determined, at least in outline, by a Cabinet of the Empire, the British peoples can neither develop their full strength for war nor speak with clear unanimity in the councils of the Alliance.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/india-at-the-conference-7thnc3nqf
India at the Conference
For the first time the direct representatives of India sit in an Imperial Conference with the representatives of Great Britain and of the Dominions
March 22, 1917
The Imperial War Conference, which is to sit in the intervals between the meetings of the War Cabinet, began yesterday at the Colonial Office, with the Colonial Secretary as Chairman. The Conference, as we have already explained, is to consider Imperial matters which are outside the direct scope of the War Cabinet.
A singularly fortunate and promising feature of its meetings is the presence of the representatives of India, Sir James Meston, the Maharajah of Bikanir, and Sir S P Sinha. They are not members of the War Cabinet, in which India is represented by its Secretary of State, to whom they act as official advisers. But they are members of the Conference at the Colonial Office, and at this Conference, where the voting is by States, India is to vote through them on equal terms with the Dominions.
Thus for the first time the direct representatives of India sit in an Imperial Conference with the representatives of Great Britain and of the Dominions. In his opening address yesterday the Colonial Secretary rightly laid stress on this development in the composition of the Imperial Conference, He offered a warm welcome to the representatives of India, and his words were echoed with unstinted approval by the Dominion members.
Nothing could be better than this. It had been assumed much too generally in India that the Indian representatives had come to London merely as advisers of the Secretary of State. Yesterday’s proceedings show that their duties, so far as the Imperial Conference is concerned, go much farther. The unanimous approval of the Dominion representatives should also help to take the sting out of the resentment which has grown in India against some of the Dominions. It has been the result of past misunderstandings, which have created much regrettable friction.
There could be no surer safeguard against the continuance of such mischief than the meeting at the Council-board of the Empire of the representatives both of India and of the Dominions together.
http://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-work-of-the-war-conference-70frdpgj3
The Work of the War Conference
The status of India as a partner State of the Empire is now recognized for all time
May 4, 1917
The resolutions published this morning do not, we need hardly say, represent the whole work of the Imperial and Dominion Ministers who have been at the meetings of the last six weeks. Much of that work has been done at the War Cabinet, and both custom and expediency are against the formal publication of Cabinet decisions. It is possible that they will be communicated to the Empire by means of Ministerial statements, if they are made public at all, just as the gist of the Imperial Preference resolution was published the other day.
We mention this point at the outset because the habitual and necessary reticence of Cabinets about their proceedings is liable, in the case of the War Cabinet which has just finished its work, to obscure its high importance. Ont of sight, out of mind. It will be a very real misfortune if the deep and lasting value of the Imperial War Cabinet is not thoroughly appreciated throughout the Empire. The fact that it met as an Executive Cabinet of the whole Empire is not all, though that, as the King said yesterday, was “a giant stride on the road of progress and Imperial development,” and both the Prime Minister and Sir Robert Borden have suggested that the precedent thus created may be followed and become established in the future. Its immediate results are more to the purpose at the moment. Beyond a doubt they have been valuable to a very high degree. Though it is difficult in the circumstances even to suggest their nature, they can perhaps best be summed up by saying that - saving Australia - the governing mind of each part of the Empire, on questions of war strategy, of the principles of foreign policy, and of peace terms, is a single mind for the first time.
But even this does not do full justice to the results of the meetings of the War Cabinet. The governing mind of the Empire is not only a single mind. It has reached unity by the paths of full knowledge and ample discussion. The complex difficulties of the war and its reactions upon Imperial policy throughout the world have been made known to the representatives of the Dominions and of India. And they, for their part, have been able to explain to Imperial Ministers the special interests which must be kept safe when terms of peace come to be considered.
The War Conference has met pari passu with the War Cabinet, and its special task is well defined in the address which its members presented to the King at Windsor yesterday. It has “considered the steps that may be required to ensure that the fruits of victory may not be lost by unpreparedness in times of peace, and so to develop the resources of the Empire that it may not be possible hereafter for an unscrupulous enemy to repeat his outrages upon liberty and civilization.”
The resolution in favour of Imperial Preference is chief among the recommendations designed to this end. We now have its text, which shows that it includes not only “specially favourable treatment and facilities” by each part of the Empire “to the produce and manufactures of other parts,” but also “arrangements by which intending emigrants from the United Kingdom may he induced to settle in countries under the British flag.” Population, in other words, is the first condition of industrial and commercial development. But there are other safeguards for the prosperity of the Empire as a single economic unit. Thus another resolution of the War Conference recommends “prompt and attentive consideration of the production of an adequate food supply and arrangements for its transportation when and where required”; of “the control of natural resources available within the Empire”; and of “the economical utilization of such natural resources through processes of manufacture carried out within the Empire.”
The Conference has had an eye, too, to the major consideration of naval defence. it requests the Admiralty to work out “immediately after the conclusion of the war what they consider the most effective scheme of naval defence for the Empire,” and to make to the various Governments concerned “such recommendations as [they] consider necessary in that respect for the Empire’s future security.”
But the members of the Conference, very wisely, have not confined themselves to such material considerations. They have gone much farther. The status of India as a partner State of the Empire is now recognized for all time. The wise discretion which ignored the Imperial Conference resolution of 1907, and summoned the representatives of India to take part in the deliberations of the War Cabinet and War Conference of the Empire is now formally ratified. India is to be “fully represented at all future Imperial Conferences.”
There is gratifying evidence, too, that the association of the Dominion and the Indian representatives has had excellent results. The Conference “accepts the principle of reciprocity of treatment between India and the Dominions.” Thus, it may be hoped, there has dawned a new day of understanding as between the Dominions and India.
And, lastly, the War Conference has set its face towards a deliberate consideration of Imperial constitutional problems, It recognizes that “the readjustment of the constitutional relations of the component parts of the Empire is too important and intricate a subject to be dealt with during the war.” But it recommends definitely that their readjustment “should form the subject of a special Imperial Conference to be summoned as soon as possible after the cessation of hostilities.”
These essentials they define as the preservation of full local autonomy; recognition of the right of the Dominions and of India “to an adequate voice in foreign policy and in foreign relations” and “effective arrangements” for “continuous consultation” and concerted action, where necessary, between the several Governments of the Empire. We need not, for the moment, be too strict to mark controversial points in this classification of the limitations of constitutional readjustment. The great thing is that a special Imperial Conference is to consider the constitutional problem. The rest may be left to the sure influence of time.
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