ABSTRACT
EVEN in the early phases of the war the thoughts of Commonwealth states-men were occupied with the problem of ensuring peace and upholding the rule of law in international society when victory was won. 'While the old order is destroying itself, said Mr. Mackenzie King on 4 September 1941,1 a new relationship 'of men and nations has already begun its slow but sure evolution'. The spirit which inspired it found expression when Britain determined to put an end to aggression in Europe, when other nations of the Commonwealth took their place at Britain's side, when the United States 'resolved to lend its powerful aid to the nations which are fighting for freedom', and in the Atlantic Charter. Events themselves were combining to create 'one great brotherhood of freedom-loving peoples'. All this, in Mr. Mackenzie King's view, was to be welcomed, for 'a new world order to be worthy of the name is something that is born, not made'. It could not be reduced to writing at a conference table at some given moment; it was something that needed to grow in the hearts and minds of men. If, therefore, it 'is not already on its way before the war is over, we may look for it in vain'. But if it were, as he believed in 1941 it was, then it could assume shape and form 'only . . . through the leadership of the British Commonwealth of Nations and the United States of America working in whole-hearted cooperation toward this great end'. A condition of their doing so, Mr. Mackenzie King implied but did not say, was the abandonment of policies of isolation, and for this reason his Guildhall speech of September 1941 may be taken to mark the formal ending of Mr. Mackenzie King's reliance upon a policy of detachment in foreign policy which had been-partly from choice and partly from necessity-so marked a feature of Canadian and indeed of dominion policies in the inter-war years.
