¹ Article I of the Treaty declared “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada … etc.” Mr. Lloyd George speaking on the Treaty said it was “difficult and dangerous to give a definition” of what Dominion status meant. See Wheare, The Statute of Westminster and Dominion Status, 2nd ed., London, 1942, p. 21.

² The phrase “autonomous nations of an Imperial Commonwealth” appears as early as 1917 in Resolution IX adopted by the Imperial War Conference. In the Irish Treaty cited above (note 1) the term “Empire” had not been abandoned. The famous declaration at the 1926 Imperial Conference used both “British Empire” and “British Commonwealth” in the same definition, with typical obscurity. The Statute of Westminster speaks only of the “British Commonwealth of Nations.” The term Empire is now used more technically to include Great Britain and the non-self-governing portion of the Commonwealth under her jurisdiction. But the old term “ Imperial Conference ” has not yet been changed to “ Commonwealth Conference.”

³ Quoted by Wheare, op. cit., p. 23.

⁴ Quoted in MacGregor Dawson, R., The Development of Dominion Status, Toronto, 1937, p. 211.Google Scholar

⁵ Imperial Conferences met in 1921, 1923, 1926, 1930, 1932 (Ottawa Economic Conference), and 1937.

⁶ The Halibut Fishery Treaty with the United States.

⁷ See speech of Premier King in Canadian House of Commons, June 9,1924: cited in Keith, A. B., Speeches and Documents of the British Dominions, 1901–1934, p. 337 Google Scholar.

⁸ The British Dominions in International Law, p. 356. In the Commonwealth independence of action should be distinguished from independence of association. The members can be completely free to act as they wish and still be associated, like the members of the Pan- American Union. See Humphrey, John P., The Inter-American System, Toronto, 1942, pp. 269–270 Google Scholar.

⁹ The Dominion Parliaments all approved the Statute in advance by resolution, thus indicating consent to the enactment. But the Statute itself came from the Imperial legislature only.

¹⁰ 1939 Statutes (Imperial), cap. 62, sec. 5.

¹¹ See the Status of the Union Act and the Royal Executive Functions and Seals Act, Statutes of South Africa, 1934, Nos. 69–70.

¹² In the preamble to the Status of the Union Act.

¹³ The phrase is borrowed from R. T. E. Latham’s chapter on “ The Law and the Commonwealth,” in Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, Vol. I, at p. 526.

¹⁴ See A. G. for Canada v. A. G.for Ontario, 1937 Appeal Cases, 326, and comments thereon in the Canadian Bar Review, June 1937.

¹⁵ Text of the Bill is in F. H. Soward and others, Canada in World Affairs: The Pre-War Years, p. 286.

¹⁶ Statutes of Canada, 1939, cap. 22. Text and comment is in F. H. Soward, op. cit., pp. 257,329.

¹⁷ “Constitutional authorities in Australia have on the whole considered that when the King is at war all his dominions are at war. There was, therefore, no declaration of war by Australia on Germany.” Round Table, December 1939, p. 191.

¹⁸ See Stewart, Robert B., “The British Commonwealth Goes to War,” in The American Foreign Service Journal, Vol. 16, No. 12, December 1939, p. 645 Google Scholar ff. A New Zealand writer has however taken the view that his country declared war herself ( Wood, F. L. W., New Zealand in Crisis, 1939, p. 30 Google Scholar) but this seems untenable.

¹⁹ See authorities listed in the present writer’s Canada Today, 2nd ed., 1939, p. 131, n. 1.

²⁰ Speech of March 31,1939, in House of Commons Debates for that date; the relevant portions are cited in F. H. Soward, op. cit., pp. 300 ff.

²¹ This action was protested in the local press by the German consul in Montreal, thus indicating, his assumption that Canada was not automatically at war. A similar attitude appears to have been taken by the Consul-General in Ottawa: see F. H. Soward, op. cit., p. 256.

²² See Dean, E. P., “Canada at War”, in Foreign Affairs, January 1940, at p. 297 Google Scholar; Round Table, December 1939, at p. 177. The Imperialists wanted the Declaration so as to commit Canada irrevocably: its effect was to show the disappearance of the old legal commitment.

²³ Round Table, March, 1942, pp. 337–338.

²⁴ Canada’s right to abolish the appeal has been upheld by the Supreme Court of Canada (1940 Canada Supreme Court Reports, 49) but the case was not carried to the Privy Council itself and hence the issue is undecided.

²⁵ Wheare, op. cit., p. 303 says: “The legal inequalities (remaining since the Statute of Westminster) were in the nature of voluntary restrictions imposed by the Dominions themselves upon the legislative competence of their Parliaments in much the same way as any community may choose to limit the powers of its legislature in its Constitution.”

²⁶ The text is in Jones, S. S. and Myers, D. P., Documents on American Foreign Relations, Vol. III, 1940–1941, Boston, 1941, p. 387 Google Scholar.

²⁷ See Scott, F. R., “Political Nationalism and Confederation,” in Canadian Journal of Economics and Political Science, August 1942, p. 386, at 390–396 Google Scholar.

²⁸ See Corbett, P. E., “The Status of the British Commonwealth in International Law,” in University of Toronto Law Journal, Vol. III, 1940, 348, 359Google Scholar.

²⁹ This point arose in Quebec in September 1939. A member of the Quebec Bar opposed Canada’s participation in the war, and was accused by a Chief Justice of having violated his oath of allegiance by so doing—an accusation clearly unfounded unless Canada was still a dependent colony.

³⁰ This conclusion supports the opinion vainly urged by the Canadian Government at the time of the appointment of the first Canadian High Commissioner to London in 1880. See the correspondence in Kennedy, W. P. M., Status, Treaties and Documents of the Canadian Constitution, 2nd ed., Boston, 1930, at p. 676 Google Scholar.