The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. MONDAY, MARCH 19, 1928.

Hokitika Guardian, 19 March 1928, Page 2

The Guardian And Evening Star, with which is incorporated the West Coast Times. MONDAY, MARCH 19, 1928.

THE FREEDOM OF THE SEAS. The essential strength ol' Great Britain is her power on the seas. And while it is so, it is also an essential ' necessary for the maintenance inviolate | of the .Empire. Great Britain has - made it plain over and over again that | she has no ideas of aggression or ng- | grandisement with her Navy, but she I does desire and intends to maintain her Empire intact. “What we have we hold,” has long, been the naval motto, and that is the essential feature of the navy’s existence to-day. Great Britain, ns an island, needs in the first place, naval defence, but chief of all that naval defence is required to maintain the ocean pathways to the far-flung possessions. Great Britain needs supplies for sustenance of her people and industries from overseas, and the sea lanes must be kept safe and secure for that maritime traffic. Just as Britain has its strong naval defences, so other countries differently | circumstanced have their strong land j defence. The numerical superiority in such cases is essential for the same reason as that of Britain, an assured defence. In nn analysis of what the freedom of the seas means to the British Empire, a naval journal stresses the point that Great Britain must maintain her strength in that vital aspect of national defence. It is of course open to the nation to assure its possessory security as a concrete Empire. So long as Great Britain remains an island and also, an independent sovereign -state, a force upon the waters able to clear away, if necessary' by arms, all obstructions to her sea-borne trade and communications i.s clearly a mere necessity of her separate national existence, for she must always fall at once completely into power of any other people able even for a few months to deprive her effectively of her use of the long sea roads. A Navy, therefore, and a powerful Navy. too. Great Britain must always • in any case possess. And. possessing \ it, she may presumably still lie permitted to use it—at least for the bare ‘ purpose of defending herself and her Dominions against attack. The Navy, accordingly, even under the new dis- , pensation of the “Freedom of the ; Seas,” (freedom for all without let or hindrance) might still presumably be used to defend any part of the British ij Empire against military invasion, or to protect- its jen-trafje from inter- j.

ference or attack. But, under that proposed dispensation 1 , it is essential to realise that any offensive use of tbc Britsh Navy against an enemy would have become lor ever impossible. For a naval, offensive operation can really take only one of two forms. It may take the direct Nelsonic form of seeking out and destroying the. regular naval forces of its enemy; or it may take the less spectacular but fundamentally more effective form of intercepting, tinder the strictest control of Law tl roughout, that stream of sea-borne supply upon which, to-day more than e'er, the whole continuance of the enemy’s naval, military, and air operat i mis must, at last depend. And. unless the British Navy maintains the right as well as the physical power thus to intercept under the control of Law these seaborne supplies of its enemy, it will never lie allowed the smallest chance of seeking out and destroying that enemy’s naval forces.