THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

Hokitika Guardian, 16 February 1928, Page 1

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS

The Foreign Powers, it lias just been reported, have “voluntarily abandoned the plan to suppress jointly piracy in South China.” The reasons given are the heavy expense involved and the danger that the Chinese, now worked up to a high pitch of Nationalist qn- ( thusiasm, may misinterpret the intentions of the foreigners. There are no doubt adequate excuses for withdrawing from an expensive, dangerous and thankless task. But the incident nihy serve to remind us that piracy lias disappeared from the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic Oceans within the past hundred years, chiefly because Britain undertook the heavy responsibility of clearing tiiose waters of free-booters and slavers. Actuated partly by . a natural desire to protect British commerce. and very largely by the determination to extend its own ideals of government over all the seas, where the British flag flew, Britain throughout the nineteenth century spent many millions of pounds in policing the Persian Gulf, the Arabian Sea, and the Indian Ocean, and sweeping the slave fleets out of existence. Tills great service to humanity was performed for nearly a hundred years unsolicited, unpaid, and almost unrecognised. When people nowadays talk about the “freedom of the seas” as threatened by the British Navy f it is well to remember that r£ is chiefly owing to the British Navy that the ocean highways are in time of peiice free to all the world, and almost wholly undisturbed by pirate or slav-