India: an Uncertain Goal

Abstract

The dominions whose status was defined in the Balfour Report and whose names were listed in section I of the Statute of Westminster were predominantly European in respect of their population and wholly European in respect of their government. There were minorities of non-European origin in Australia, in Canada and in New Zealand; there was a large non-European majority in the Union of South Africa. But neither minorities nor majority were in a position to exert a decisive influence upon government. In Canada and even in South Africa it was the cultural tensions between peoples of European stock that hitherto had exercised a formative influence upon national policy, and possibly for that reason it was in the past by no means unknown, however much discountenanced by Canadian scholars, for the term ‘race’ to be applied to relations between English and French-speaking Canadians, while on the lips of South African politicians the terms ‘race’ and ‘racial’, until recent times, customarily referred to relations between British and Afrikaners.¹