THE PRINCIPLES OF DEFENSE

HE President on his Western tour advocated for the United States a navy second to none.

“There is no navy in the world that has so great an area of defense as the American Navy, and it ought to be incomparably the greatest navy in the world."

When the President made this statement there was no plan before Congress, even in the future, for a navy to equal England's, and the Secretary of the Navy's plan would have to count upon the destruction of some foreign vessels to make our Navy even second best.

But whatever relative size our Navy ultimately achieves, one thing is certain: we should add what strength and morale we can to the Navy now, for, as the President said at Kansas City:

Speaking with all solemnity, I assure you that there is not a day to be lost; not, understand me, because of any new or specially critical matter, but because I cannot tell twenty-four hours at a time whether there is going to be trouble or not, and whether there is or no does not depend upon what I do or what I say, or upon what any man in the United States does or says. It depends upon what foreign governments do; what the commanders of ships at sea do; what those in charge of submarines do; what those who are conducting blockades do. Upon the judgment of a score of men, big and little, hang the vital issues of peace or war for the United States.

The future size of our Navy is dependent upon our international relations. In the past we have never even pretended to prepare against the British Navy, either because we felt that our proximity to Canada. was sufficient guarantee of peace, or because we feared no trouble with England, or, perhaps, because it would cost too much. The General Board's programme which, however, was neither published nor followed, would have been adequate to meet either Germany or Japan. The President's plan of a navy second to none would, of course, put us on a par with any one nation. But nowadays nations fight in groups. It is impossible for us to build a navy sufficient to meet any possible combination that might come against us. We

could, however, presumably build a navy large enough to hold the balance of power between two groups and render ourselves immune from attack. In fact, our immunity in the past may partially be laid to the fact that neither faction in Europe. wished to force us into the camp of its enemies. If the war ends in a deadlock that situation may continue. If not, the old balance of power will be upset, and, until the equilibrium is found again in some way, it would be comforting to have a larger navy than we are likely to have when the war ends. For, while we are at peace with the world, our traditional policy of no entanglements means that we should have to look out for ourselves in case of war unless it were very plainly to some other nation's advantage to join us.

Our policy has the inestimable virtue of keeping us out of other people's wars, and the corollary of this is that we must ourselves be ready to attend to our own.

The average American has always looked upon his problem of national defense as the Englishman has looked upon his-and they are the only two peoples in the world who have put their main dependence in their navies, hired a small army of professional soldiers for police work and to attend to minor foreign expeditions, and for the rest depended on volunteers. The American looks upon the United States as if it were a great island-and essentially he is right. And the work of the British Navy in the present war is convincing proof that we can do no better than imitate their big naval policy. On the other hand their military experiences ashore are a warning to us not to follow their example when framing our army policy.

Their regular army was good, as ours is, and though twice as large as ours, its size is negligible in a modern conflict. Their territorials were not sufficient in numbers or training. Their main reliance was upon training a volunteer army while their allies held the Germans off. And, of course, finally they came to conscription.

There is only one way for us to escape all these ineffective and terribly costly steps that finally lead to universal service, and that is to adopt the principle of universal service to begin with.