THE NAVAL PROBLEM

Hokitika Guardian, 15 August 1929, Page 8

THE NAVAL PROBLEM

(Auckland Star.)

it seems probable that Air Hoover may yet have cause to regret tlie generous impulse which induced lilm to promise a temporary suspension of naval building in response to Mr MacDonald’s offer. The President has been assailed with great bitterness by American “ big navy” enthusiasts, and he is now plainly told that his action is illegal. As Congress gave a mandate, for the construction olf the cruisers under discussion, it would appear that the President’s fiat alone cannot affect the issue, and a Democratic senator has gone the length of reminding Air Hoover that, ns a committee has been sef up to consider the systematic lawbreaking from which the Americans now suffer, it is not for the Presidenl to set a had' example to his people by ignoring a fundamental principle of the Constitution.

There can be little doubt that, American public opinion at the present moment is not inclined to favour any form of armament limitation which can possibly benefit Britain. At the same time, the colossal buliding programme sponsored by Air Britten and the “ bir navy ” school has startled the taxpayers, and there is a tendency to consider any possible alternative that may help to obviate such prodigious expenditure. This is clearly the source and origin of the demand, now steadily gathering strength, that “parity” should be reached not by naval construction, but by systematic reduction, in place of a building competition, what is needed is wholesale “ scrapping,” and Britain is being plainly told that if she is really in earnest about disarmament and world-peace, the best thing that she can do is to sink the surplus warships and cruisers which at present give her naval superiority over the United States. When the Americans talk in this way they seem to forget entirely what Britain has already done in the way of reducing her naval armament. Before the war Britain had 114 cruisers, and now she has only 52. She had in 1914 far more destroyers and submarines than the Americans, but now the returns show that Britain has ,252, the United States 427. Since 1919 Britain has scrapped 2,160,000 tons of naval shipping, and her trained officers! and men are nearly 50,009 fewer than on the Navy Estimates for 1914. The Estimates for 1929 represent 7 per cent of the National Budget, whereas in 1914 the naval charges amounted to nearly 25 per cent of the public expenditure. Britain, with her world-w

Empire, her immense oceanic commerce and a population of 500,000,000 to protpet, has done infinitely more in tinway, of naval disarmament since the war than all the other nations combined.

It is little wonder that those responsible for. the safety of the Empire are beginning to ask themselves if this policy can be allowed to go much further. The United States, with a compact, self-supporting and practically invulnerable country, and a population hot one-quarter of the British Empire’s muster-roll, is spending over £70,000,000 a year on nayal purposes, as against the British Naval Estimates of £56,000,000, and yet the American are not satisfied. Apart from the crucial question of national safety, it should remembered that, as Sir A. Hurd has lately reminded the world, the British navy has been in past times “ a great civilising influence and a bulwark of peace.” Suppressing piracy, eradicating the slave trade, charting the oceans and rendering them safe for sea-borne commerce of all the nations', the British navy has done splendb work in the interests of human progress, and its strength has been used almost uniformly on the side of free peoples and freedom. Not only Britain, but the world at large, can i! afford to dispense with such services, and these considerations should play their part in the controversy over naval disarmament.