FRENCH CIRCUMLOCUTION DEPARTMENT.

Rangitikei Advocate and Manawatu Argus, Volume XXXIV, Issue 9387, 5 March 1909, Page 3

FRENCH CIRCUMLOCUTION DEPARTMENT.

Time was, and not so very long since, when her neighbours sought occasion only to pick holes in Britain’s coat. Nowadays they are uniting in a psean of“praise directed towards the very superior manner of doing things important on our side of the Channel. A representative of Germany was pleased recently to accord the most whole-hearted admiration to the beneficence of British rule in India, and, later, we discover that France admits the possibility of learning much from English methods as applied to naval construction. M. Greville-Reaobe writing In the Matin sets Portsmouth and Toulon dockyards in vivid contrast, and is more than lavish in his praise of the British institution. It appears that at Toulon not even a bolt can be placed in position without the necessary authorisation of the Minister of Marine. The written request dawdles along on its upward pasasge to the Minister through the hands of twenty-two persons and, finally, atfer having been signed it filters back again through numerous strata of officials of diminishing importance until it is received, doubtless with joy unbounded, by the workmen who first set the complex machinery in motion. It is pointed out as a matter for no surprise that M. Piohard, French Minister for Marine, has been constrained to admit that the building of a battleship which takes France five years to accomplish can be effected by Germany in three and by England in two. The reason for British celerity is explained by M. Stephane Lauganne, who recently visited Portsmouth. He found the artificers working according to order, responding like one man to an authority which, untrammelled by red tape, worked with the regularity and smoothness of a watch. And then he gives his impressions of a visit to the Toulon arsenal—impressions which bear a singular resemblance to the strictures passed upon a certain New Zealand State manufactory which shall be nameless. Thus: “Toulon gives one the impression of a manufactory half asleep—a manufactory from which a strike has removed half the workmen and disheartened the other half. The workshops had a sleepy air, and between the deliberate —too deliberate —blows of the hammer one caught the fragments of conversation. Languidly hammered keels of torpedo t boats; heaps of debris rusting awaylazylooking workmen, who stand as if they were ( dreaming before their machines; silence; sadness; an atmosphere as of bad feeling between employers and employed —“such is the arsenal of Toulon.” It is questionable whether, after all, there is much to be gained by a country subjecting itself to so scarifying a process of self-examination “in the face of her neighbours as has been done for France. It is one thing to be convinced of something amiss internally, and quite another to proclaim the symptoms from the housetops. Seeing that Britain has a world-wide naval supremacy to maintain, the obvious retort to France is that of course she can never bo like us, but at *the same time no one would begrudge her becoming as like ns as she is able to be; and that apparently is the object of th 6 candid criticism already referred to.—Press.