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To the Western world, preoccupied with the problems posed by sputniks, disarmament, NATO and North Africa, the sudden crisis which has arisen in the Western Pacific over the Indonesian claim to that part of New Guinea which is administered by the Dutch seems a tiresome irrelevance, a side issue and a nuisance. To Australians who are responsible for the other half of New Guinea, the situation is charged with potential dangers which they fear are not appreciated elsewhere — a crisis on their immediate borders which puts their whole foreign policy in Asia to a sharp test.

The Australian Prime Minister's oratorical tour of Great Britain is receiving almost as big advertisement in a section of the London press as did British politician Arthur Neville Chamberlain's "raging and tearing propaganda" in 1903. One can scarcely believe that this attention is being given to the Australian Prime Minister purely out of compliment to the colonies, or even in recognition of his personal eminence. Nor does the alleged purpose of his tour explain the phenomenon. Ostensibly the object of his mission is to emphasize the necessity of "organization," but it is difficult to suppose that this journalistic boom is inspired by a sudden passion for system as the great desideratum in British business life.