Community of the Parliaments of the English-Speaking Peoples: First Steps

In the past year and a half, first steps have been taken toward the building up of a community of the parliamentarians of the English-speaking peoples. The development in the past thirty-two years of a community of the parliamentarians of the British Commonwealth to the point where it has become a central institution of the Commonwealth was dealt with in a previous article.A Shrine of Family Reunion. Those who were present in the Canadian House of Commons at Ottawa on June 26, 1943, at the first conference between a duly appointed delegation from both houses of the American Congress and delegations from the Parliaments of the British Commonwealth felt that they were witnessing an important event; it was a development, they believed, which might prove hardly less important in history than the obscure first meetings of knights of the shire and burgesses out of which parliamentary institutions emerged in the thirteenth century. A remark in the last moments of the Conference by Mr. Sol Bloom, chairman of the Committee on Foreign Affairs of the United States House of Representatives, expressed this feeling. He spoke of the room as “a shrine of family reunion”; the thought had come to him, he said, that this room in which this historic first conference had been held should be made a shrine, for within those four walls ideas had come forth that day that should lay everlasting foundations for the future of the peoples of the world.