IN

A NAVAL PARTITION

N so far as the Washington Conference has been engaged in arranging for a naval holiday,' it has been helping the Sea Powers of to-day to set about doing all together, and by an understanding among themselves, what in former times they did each for itself, simultaneously, and without international agreement. It has been employed in providing for a cutting down of outlay on the military navies-not, to be sure, on all of them, but on those which, as things stand, really matter. Until the middle of the nineteenth century the world in general accepted war as a time of waste, and looked on peace as an opportunity for thrift and recuperation. Armaments were cut down with a drastic pruning knife, so soon as peace was signed. When war came again, and it was wont to return at intervals of from ten to fifteen years, everybody was liable to be unprepared. There was an interval of months, or perhaps a year, during which a hurry and scurry of getting ready preceded vigorous operations of war. The modern critic is very apt to quote this delay and confusion as proof that the rulers of nations were unwise, because habitually they went into wars without timely provision of the means for conducting them efficiently. The critic makes his point with effect, but he is liable to see no more than is visible to him between his professional blinkers: he forgets that but for the intervals of thrift and recuperation the nations might very well, and in many cases would, have been unable to recover from the waste and the exhaustion of the war. If they had not been courageous enough to run the risk inseparable from a wholesale reduction of armaments they would have been permanently impoverished.

No government acted more recklessly-as the critic puts itthan our own. No force was more subject to extreme fluctuations than the British Navy. It soared up to an establishment of 120,000 or 140,000 seamen and marines in war, to drop in peace to 8,000 or 10,000. In 1775-the year of the proclamation for 'Suppressing Rebellion and Sedition in North America '-there were over ten thousand seamen and marines on the books'

at home. The vote for men was cut down by 2,000. In the spring of 1776 there were but 8,933. Except in actual war the foreign stations were in all cases composed of but few ships and they as a rule were small. In January, 1778, when the war with France was beginning, there were but six vessels in all in the East Indies, and the same number in the Mediterranean. On the coast of North America, and in the West Indies, there were of course many more for obvious reasons, of which not the least influential was the destructive activity of American privateers. But they were generally small. There was no scruple felt at the Admiralty when economy called for reductions in the establishment-and for two good reasons. The first was that the pension list was trifling. Only commissioned officers were entitled to pension and that on a penurious scale. In 1773 an agitation led by Howe forced Lord North to consent to the addition of the lordly sum of £7,000 to the total half pay of captains. It was then fixed at 10s. a day for fifty captains, 8s. for thirty, and 6s. for the others in order of seniority. Lieutenants received less. Officers who had only been acting in that rank, and had not been confirmed by the Admiralty, got nothing. Petty officers, the class which included chaplains and midshipmen, had no half pay.

As for the seamen they belonged, not to the Navy' as a corps, but only to a ship. When she was paid off there was an end of any connection between them and the Navy. So a reduction of establishment was a very real economy, which could be the more cheerfully applied because when officers, who had been left on half pay all through the peace, came back to the Navy on the return of war, they found just the same ship, the same gun, the same armament all round, that they had left ten or fifteen years before. Officers of distinction, Saumarez, for instance, and Pellew, were left unemployed from one war to another. When they had no means of their own, or but little, which was the case with most of them, they went to sea in trading ships, or sought other lines of life. Lord Keith served the East India Company, Commodore James ran a packet to the West Indies on his own account, and fed his passengers regardless of expense. Pellew went into partnership in a brewery.

We have changed all that. All the world knows how great the alteration has been. But there is one elementary, universal, and commanding condition which is what it ever was-or rather

which lays a heavier hand on us than ever it did. War is more costly than it was in any previous age. The last has caused more unproductive expenditure than all the fighting of the eighteenth century put together. Therefore, if I may be allowed to put it so the devil dances in the pocket of the civilised world. We cannot afford not to restrain armaments. The 'saving of 'civilisation' may be a mere ear-filling phrase; the promotion of good fellowship among nations, the foundation of a reign of peace may be (we are fully prepared to allow that they are) noble aims. But in this work-a-day world, and when practical work has to be done, it is safer, and will be found to be more productive of good, to keep to bald fact, even if it looks a little sordid.

Now the bald fact at present is that downright lack of pence is driving all public men to understand that there must be a limit to expenditure. The philosopher and the humanitarian can give moral reasons for restriction of armaments. But the argument of the economist is more likely to be listened to than the eloquence of the wise and benevolent. They strive to touch the heart, but it is deceitful above all things, and desperately 'wicked, who can know it?' The militarist bigot, une bonne ligne droite de férocité sotte, makes no response to their appeal, or only a hectoring denial. The economist directs his efforts to persuade at the pocket which is sensitive. And pockets are far more capable of being unanimous than are the emotions of men. The utter numbskull finds it comparatively easy to understand the sense, and also the universal applicability, of the French maxim that 'Where there is nothing, the King loses 'his rights,' when the income tax inspector is screwing up his assessment by a half or more in order to force him to show up to the last penny of his earnings. And this the zealous official is bound to do because the Treasury is hungering and thirsting for every penny it can scrape, squeeze or bully, out of the taxpayer's pocket. And the Treasury, in its turn, is bound to worry the inspector because the King's Government must be carried on, and that cannot be without money. Great is bankruptcy, said Carlyle, because it brings all shams, and impostures, and make-believes, down to the curbstone of fact.

By using the printing press for the production of paper money, and by raising loans on such terms as the young spendthrift

takes from the money lender, a nation can go on for a time spending more than it has. Bankruptcy can afford to wait for its prey, but it watches, and, in the end, pounces. Already the fear of it has compelled a beginning of thrift. M. René La Bruyère, writing on 'La Marine Française et le Désarmement' in the Revue des Deux Mondes for November 1st, points out that the Rue Royale, that is to say the French Admiralty, has abstained from building capital ships' for seven years 'faute de ressources 'financières.' Our own admiralty had been already taking a holiday in that way for some six years before the Hood' superdreadnoughts were voted, and for the same reason. We neither mean, nor are guilty of, any lack of respect to Mr. Harding's administration, if we take it for granted that they startled a rather unthinking world on November 12th with their scheme for a suspension of building because the United States, which have suffered far less from the war than from their own reckless spilth of their funds (it has been outrageous on the maritime side), are also being sobered by a vision of bankruptcy. They are very much in the right. It is no more honest and no more safe for nations than for individuals to spend beyond their means and impoverish themselves for ever in order to cut a dash for the day.

So for ourselves as for our fathers it has become an absolute necessity to allow the parsimony of peace to make good the waste of war. The circumstances are different. We can no longer go to work in the simple way which was enough for the ministers of George II or George III, namely, by mere cutting down and sending adrift. We must do the same thing, but we must do it in the conditions of a changed world.

Before approaching the Washington Conference any nearer, it is an obligation of mere common sense to make very plain to ourselves what those conditions are. In order to be the better able to see our proper subject in a dry light it will be well to abstain from irrelevancies. What is, and what is to be, the relative position of the British Navy to other Navies? That is our theme. The answer is to be made after consideration of their respective strengths. Such high matters as national sympathies, moral standards and the like are most interesting, and even important, but they must not be allowed to mislead us into wandering to right and to left of the matter in hand.

When we begin by inquiring what is the position of the British Navy to-day in face of other existing naval forces, the facts make reply--that it is weaker than it ever has been since the signing of the Peace of Utrecht in 1712. At that date the French Navy had withered more because of the extravagance of the Government of Louis XIV in military adventure, overweening ambition, and bad finance, than from the blows we inflicted on it. Holland was exhausted, and was becoming torpid. Outside these two there was only a mere dust of small naval armaments anywhere. The same position returned after 1815, and in the interval we were always predominant in Europe, while in the remote seas there was, during the interval between those dates, but the little, which tended continually to grow less, that could be sent out by our European enemies. If Europe only need be considered, our victory was as complete in 1918 as it had been in 1712, 1763, or 1815. Germany, the only opponent we had need to take into account, was not only defeated, but conquered-its army as good as disbanded, its fleet surrendered, and itself compelled to live, and work, under the inspection of its conquerors. And yet we have to allow the truth of what sounds a paradox, namely that we are weaker than before we won the war, with, of course, the help of our Allies. The reason is obvious enough. It matters little that Germany has disappeared from the seas, and that France has been compelled to sacrifice her Navy to her army, as had been the case with our older ally, Holland, in the war of the Spanish Succession. The United States Navy has leapt up, is claiming equality on the sea, and is even on the way to reach superiority. The Japanese Navy has grown to such proportions that either the United States or Great Britain would be severely taxed to fight with her single-handed in the China Seas. Superiority in European waters we have, and cannot, except by our own act, lose. But that is far from enough.

For Great Britain (I will for a reason to be given abstain from saying British Empire) to be superior in Europe, but not also in the vast remote oceans, is to be nothing less than reduced from her old rank, and defeated. Great Britain has had, and still has, to supply the naval force which keeps open the internal communications between the Mother Country, and all the Dominions, Commonwealths, Unions, and Crown Colonies making up the whole, of which this island is the centre and the