FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

Dominion, Volume 11, Issue 35, 5 November 1917, Page 6

FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

WHAT THE GERMANS MEAN BY IT

AN UNREPORTED SPEECH

(By I'. Sefton Delmer, lato English Lecturer at Berlin University, in the "Daily Mail.")

What do the Germans mean by "the freedom of the seas"? As their statesmen, their publicists, and their Press systematically retrain from defining it, wo cannot but conclude that the real virtuo of the phrase lies in its intentional indoliniteness and elasticity. "Accurate definition," said the greatest dialectician of the ancient ivorld, "is one ol tho first requirements of good speaking," and it is a thousand pities that the Pope in making himself the protagonist of this ambiguous German doctrine should have forgotten this.

During my recent stay in Berlin ,T. heard the words "Freiheit der Meero," bandied about often enough, and reams of newspaper sermons were preached oh the text. In a Socratic vein I asked various Germans of my acquaintance what the expression really meant, but 1 could never get a satisfactory answer. In England the man in tho street takes the term to mean freedom for the Germans to coal at our porta in times of peace and to run in and out of our harbours' in the same uncontrolled fashion as before the war. The jurist, on the other hand, says that the term can evidently not apply to times of peace, but can only mean that the German wishes us to forfeit our right' of search and blockade in time of war.

Count Eeventlow, however, at a great public meeting in March, 1917, in the Berlin Philharmonic Hall, gave quite a different interpretation, and as everything he said that evening had been memorised from a carefully censored- manuscript, not a word of which he would have been allowed to utter unless his explanation had been in harmony with the ideas of the Government. I think I am justified in calling the following definition the official one.

"What do we Germans understand by the freedom of tlio seas?" he said. "Of course we do not mean by it that free use of the sea which is the common privilege of all nations in times of peace, the right to the open highways of international trade. That sort of freedom of the sea we had before the war. What we understand to-day by this dootrine is that Germany should possess such maritime territories and such naval bases that at the outbreak of a war we should be able, with o.ur Navy ready, reasonably to guarantee ourselve6 the command of the sens. We want such a jumping-off place for our Navy as would give us a fair chance cf dominating the seas and of being free of the seas during a war. (Cheers.) The inalienable possession of the Belgian seaboard is therefore a matter of life and death to us, nnd the man is a traitor who would faint-heartedly relinquish this coast to England. Our aim must be not only to keep what our arms have already won on this coast, but sooner or later to extend our seaboard to the south of the Straits of Calais."

Next day I searched the newspaper reports of the meeting, including Reventloir's own "Deutsche Tageszeitung," for a reference to this passago, the most interesting in an otherwise dreary and uninspiring speech, but, significantly enough, I f ound not the slighest allusion to it. To sum up, the world nti large will interpret "freedom of the seas" to mean "freedom for everybody in times of peace"; the German, with his peculiarly constructed mind, will interpret it to moan "freedom for Germany in times of war." ,