The Press Tuesday, April 19, 1921. Naval Expenditure and War.

Press, Volume LVII, Issue 17123, 19 April 1921, Page 6

The Press Tuesday, April 19, 1921. Naval Expenditure and War.

Mr M gteM y put into words what many people are thinking, when ho said that we should have to go through another war. "It might not be for ten, "twenty, or forty years, but it would " assuredly take place," Nobody with a sense of responsibility would care to say very positively that Mr Ma&ey's fears are groundless. Anything may be in-train to happen forty years hence; •even the year 1941 is too far distant to "be the subject of confident prophecy. Bub there are some grounds, nevertheless, for hoping that the \Prime Minister's expectations are altogether too gloomy. In the firat place, although the Versailles Treaty .is now recognised by everybody, as anything but a Treaty to end war, the capacity of the peoples and their Governments to work into their policies the main principle of the League of Nations Covenant has not yet been cleariy found wanting. More important, however, than the spirit of the Covenant as a factor making for the abandonment of war is the force that will be exerted by the cost of competition in arinawents. Two of the three leading Powers in the world —Britain and Japan—are island powers, and' America's position, if Canada is for the moment left out of account, is practically that of an island. These Powers aire therefore obliged to concentrate their defensive preparations on ships of war—the most costly, and, from one point of view the most wasteful, form of national insurance. Warships are wasteful in this sense, that they are not permanent instruments of defence. They rapidly become obsolete. They are perfectly effective when they are launched, and for a very few years thereafter, and then they cease to be of substantial value. They are walls which must be pulled down and completely replaced. Yet any nation whose life depends upon the sea must maintain a constantly effective Navy so long as there ib a risk of war, and therefore while the risk of war is a reality Britain, America, and Japan must continue to build fleets and scrap them. The cost of naval defence is m> enormous that if competition continues the burden will he greater than can be borne. Japan is already devoting to her Army and Navy one-half of her total expenditure. In America and Britain the ratio ia very much less than that, but the ratio will rise if no arrangement can be made. We shall see within the next year or two whether a formal Anglo-American agreement relating to naval strength is possible. If it is, then the peril of a great war within the measurable future will have disappeared. In the meantime it is essential that the British Empire shall have a Navy sufficient *o enforce respect for the rights of tho British nations, and in the maintenance of this Navy, New Zealand must do her part, for the people of the United Kingdom, who have borne the heat and burden of the day of Imperial growth, will not be content to accept merely nominal support from the Doxainionot

The Coal Conference. The nature of the discussions at the Wellington Conference between the representatives of the Mine Owners' Association and the Miners' Federation, which met last Friday to consider the coal dispute, will have prepared the public for the somewhat abrupt termination of the negotiations. The Association, it will be remembered, refused in February to meet the Federation in conference unless the latter withdrew certain of its demands, which the Association had declined to discuss on two previous occasions. Subsequently the Association, as an act of grace, acceded to the request for a conference, hoping possibly that tho miners' representatives would see the desirableness of eliminating from their list of demands those to which objection had been taken in the two previous years, and that they would come to tho conference prepared to discuss the points at issue in a reasonable spirit. Events have proved that these hopes, if they were entertained, were quite fallacious. The Federation's representatives came to tho conference table in what can only be described as a violently unconciliatory spirit. They supported their demands, of which they would abate nothing, by a number of irrelevant and unconvincing statements. Of these wo may quote one as a sample: "The shorter tho working "hours of tho men encaged in the "mining industry, the better for all " concerned." Tho only conclusion one can draw from this extraordinary contention is that in putting it forward, Mr O'Rourke made a mental reservation that the worda "all concerned" did not include the owners or the pub* lie, indifference to the interests of either of these classes being quite 'n accordance with the attitude of the Labour extremists. As an offset to this statement, which is, of course, selfcondemned, we have the testimony of a representative of the Mineß Department, that if the miners' demands for shorter hours, tho abolition of the contract system, and full pay for yearly holidays, which have just been placed for the third time before the owners, were granted, the cost of coal at tho mine would have been more than doubled, We have also Mr Reece'a assurance that if the present demands were granted the already high cost of coal, which, as it is, is a burden \ipott the whole community, would be further increased by 100 per cent. That is quite probable; no one, we believe, not even the most irreconcilable of the miners' representatives, would seriously claim fhat the output of coal would be as great as it is now under a system of shorter hours combined with the abolition of the contract system. Tho owners therefore took the position that they could, not possibly entertain the miners' proposals. We do not see what other course was open to them; The complaint by a representative of the Federation that the miners were apI parently to be denied any opportunity of debate, and had not been treated fairly, fails in face of the fact that the Federation had done most of the talking for a day and a half. The subsequent announcement by the same delegate that the miners intend to fight, was only what haa been generally expected. It will be unfortunate if tho present depression is intensified by i industrial trouble in the shape of ft miners' strike, but Now Zealand has worried through equally serious troubles in the past.