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By Root 849 0

'"how much do you make Canada pay towards the cost of your Navy?" or "will you reward the Australians for their efforts in the war by treating them better afterwards?"' Considerable time and resources were devoted in an attempt to correct such impressions, but it is questionable how far these efforts succeeded and the degree to which prominent Americans were encouraged to talk less 'as if the British Empire were in the process of dissolution'.25 Lord Snell, present at a speech given at the Royal Empire Society in January 1943, had argued that it was better for America to be critical of the Empire than indifferent as if it was interested differences could be explained away. They should not think of it as 'something completed'. 'The Empire was not breaking up, it was growing up.' There were others who were more indignant; one writer put it that the hint that perhaps the British Empire was doomed beyond recall would be 'greeted by a storm of abuse, spluttering futility, or humorous evasion'.26 The 'Special Relationship' endured despite such fears and suspicions; today the debate centres increasingly on which of the two has been more 'imperial' in the way in which it dominated the international system of its day.27

This all came at a price, the financial cost of the British effort to hold its position was simply staggering. The taxpayer had funded the war, and in the process the country had become a debtor nation, by the war's end the largest in the world: it owed £15 billion to the United States and a further £3 billion to other members of the Sterling Zone. Here was ample demonstration, if more were needed, of how the alliance had changed. The individual fiscal burden to the British was enormous, no less than 42 per cent of the whole of the personal income from the outbreak of war up until victory in Europe had been taken in taxation or out of savings to finance the government's expenditure. The country had sold almost everything it had, including £1.1 billion of foreign assets, but accumulated debts around the world totalled £2.7 billion. Churchill had not been afraid to tell Stalin at the Potsdam conference in the summer of 1945 that Britain 'came out of this war as the greatest debtor in the world' and that the country was in effect bankrupt. When Lend-Lease was abruptly ended that following September Britain had received over £31 billion of supplies; Washington decided to issue an invoice for just £650 million but this was still money that Britain did not have.28 Militarily the cost was just as high.29

Much thought had been devoted throughout the last years of the war to how the alliance could move forward intact and with a sense of Imperial unity that would provide Britain a voice in the new international system greater than its shattered economical position should allow. Even with a change in government -the new Labour government was determined to maintain British influence in the world—the Empire was not to be surrendered. It was seen as the solution to most problems in the post-war period, what one writer has described as 'a convenient framework for projecting a certain image of Britain'. Broadly speaking it was still a British Commonwealth; out of a population of about 87 million spread around the globe, about 15 million were not British and these were predominantly in South Africa and Canada. Unfortunately this goal did not materialize as the nature of the Dominion idea quickly changed. Sweeping political changes were about to take place and this would alter the balance beyond all pre-war comprehension, in the eyes of some commentators actually giving the Dominions a key role in preserving the Empire's future. It would also bring with it issues of British citizenship and allegiance to the Crown and the realization that none of the new club was prepared to unhesitatingly follow the ideas developed by British officials. Some of this had been foreseen by Lord Halifax in the spring of 1944, when commenting on the FO memorandum discussing the alliance's future. He had already identified that the use of the terms 'Dominions'