The War and Irish Unity (1939)

A fact brought out by the present crisis, and one to which British public opinion has been strangely blind, is that arrangements for co-operation in Foreign Policy and Defence have at times been considerably less close between the various autonomous members of the British Commonwealth than between Italy and Germany or England and France. The centrifugal tendencies of the past twenty years have reached a point where it is not difficult to understand the calculated indiscretion of Mr. Malcolm MacDonald, who, shortly before leaving the Dominions Office, observed that he had sometimes been tempted to doubt the Commonwealth’s durability.