At a great crisis in the history of the American Commonwealth, Abraham Lincoln in a speech delivered in June, 1858, used these words: “If we could first know where we are and whither we are tending, we could better judge what to do and how to do it.” The British Commonwealth has reached a crisis in its affairs, but the nature of the crisis escapes the diagnosis of most students and many are inclined, therefore, to echo the words which Lincoln used nearly a hundred years ago. It seems worth while, accordingly, to set down as simply as possible some of the changes that have occurred in the structure and composition of the Commonwealth in recent years, in the hope that, on this basis, some judgment may be hazarded about “where we are and whither we are tending.”

When the War ended in 1945 the British Commonwealth could still be described in the terms adopted almost twenty years before, at the Imperial Conference of 1926, as a group of “autonomous communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations.”