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TRADE. Commonwealth membership is a good way to hold on to markets already achieved. Loans are easier to get in prosperous Britain (see BUSINESS) than in New York, for British bankers are familiar with the problems of such places as Accra and Lagos and Colombo. Tariff preferences and unity in the sterling bloc is another bond (but Canada is a dollar area); India, Pakistan, Malaya and Ghana all keep their balances in London vaults.
BRITISH SCHOOLING. Ceylon's Prime Minister Solomon West Ridgeway Dras Bandaranaike was a fellow student of Anthony Eden at Oxford; India's Nehru and the King of Buganda went to Cambridge. Pakistan's boss, General Mohammed Ayub Khan, was trained at Sandhurst, Britain's West Point, as was India's Chief of Staff, General Thimmaya. Every fourth cadet on parade at Sandhurst is dark-skinned. Nyasaland's rabble-rousing Dr. Hastings Banda got his postgraduate medical education at Edinburgh, Kenya's Tom Mboya went to Oxford, Ghana's Nkrumah to the London School of Economics, and Singapore's new Communist-leaning Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew is a Cambridge honors graduate, which Britons feel makes him easier to reason with. Currently, British universities have some 18,000 Commonwealth students. The old school tie is found in every corner of the Commonwealth. Says Canada's Ambassador to the U.N. Charles Ritchie: "We appreciate the same jokes and reminiscences."
LANGUAGE. Many of the new nationalist leaders are more fluent in English, the lingua franca of the Commonwealth, than in their native tongues.
BRITAIN ITSELF. London is still the Commonwealth mecca. Last week it was playing host to Australia's Prime Minister Robert Menzies and to conventions of Commonwealth motorists, and fruit growers. A parliamentary delegation from Ghana was conferring in Whitehall. Said an Indian diplomat: "If almost any other member dropped out of the Commonwealth, it might well survive. But if Britain dropped out, it would vanish."
Dovetails. The "traffic of men and minds within the Commonwealth" covers nearly every activity, from Point Fourlike economic-development projects like the Colombo Plan to the training of Afro-Asian technicians in Canada and Australia for fighting disease in equatorial jungles. In the Korean war Commonwealth members fought together in a single division. A news correspondent may send messages between Commonwealth nations at a bargain 1 1/7¢a word.
A degree from almost any accredited Commonwealth school is acceptable to all others. Great Britain, Australia and New Zealand have dovetailed their old-age pension plans, medical and unemployment benefits so as to make them interchangeable. Even Eire and Burma, which left the Commonwealth, are elliptically described as "not foreign countries." The tradition of the dignity of the individual seems to pay off. In not a single Commonwealth country is there a major Communist Party of importance or prestige.