THE NAVAL CRISIS.

Taranaki Daily News, Volume LII, Issue 88, 10 May 1909, Page 4

THE NAVAL CRISIS.

f; INTERESTING SIDELIGHTS. , my x. P. O'Connor, in M.A.P.) , £" You "can never toll how people at , f"-; Westminster will lake « groat national , 'crisis. When the whole world is rock- , P-- lag to its very base-as the hnglish " , I- doing at this moment— itsometime & happens that the House of Common* £'. remains perfectly calm. On the other '> , hand, the House of Commons may have f" its:moments of tempest while all the !' rest of mankind remains train|Ml and, ? >; indeed, indifferent. s'-'' I take as an instance of the former % state of. affairs the appearance and v V' ; manner of the House of Commons' during those dark days of the disasters of the Transvaal War, when th e whole l. -world stood aghast and when the com- %■ ijnone'st man in the street held his head pfa humiliation over the loss of his coun- • ftrj*B old prestige as a great fighting 'nation. "1.THE BATTLEGROUND. You might imagine that down in the 1 House. of Commons you woul! have ■ • found tremendous excitement stormy '.-debates, a Cabinet sitting in pernia- .,, nenee, a House of Commons which neither thought nor spoke of anything • '■" eHe but the war. As a matter of fact. ■what you would have found was that i the House of Commons was quite calm, 5 .even dull and dreary; that in the midst •;'. ''''Ot this tremendous concentration of the . public mind on the war the war was r rarely mentioned, and the House of " Commons proceeded in its quiet, dull, ,; ' * automatic way discussing London water . bills, Irish troubles, and the state of ■ • the Poor Law. {'•. You. might detect now and then an underline of anxiety, of absorption, of I some ruileetion of the popular mood : outside, but you had to probe for these I":;, .things; the surface was trarqnil. On J the other hand, you often com: down ;o ,' the House of Commons and find that it c . is quite athletic, that everybody is tx- *%',... 9)ted over some incident—it may be a -"' small personal incident or a petty per-

sonal quarrel; thus do the two worlds j sometimes co-exist side by side, and a-e as different in their moods as the :it*le freshwater stream is from the tempestuous ocean, by the sid e of which it sometimes pursues the even tenor of Its petty wav. ! MR. ASQUITIfS SPEECH. _ At this moment, however, there is a clo*c "correspondence between the moidj and abearance of the House of Com- " mons and the mood and appearand ol the public outside. For once the excitement is eHnal in the two worlds. Then never was in the memory of the o!d?st member of the House such a strange, dramatic, and almost affrighting -cone as that which followed Mr. Asqnith's speech las't week. 'Dumbfounded, . astounded, really shocked and appalled, the House of Commons held its breath when the clear resonant voice ceased to echo through j the chamber; ..the stillness that followed bad something in it of tire solemnity of the grave or of that terrible calm which: precedes some convulsion of the howels of the earth; there was a pause, not very long, perhaps, as counted by the hands' of the clock, but to those wno passed through it seeming something like an sterility. It looked as if there were going to be one of those epoch-making scenes in the history of a country which mark some great decision on which th e fate of all the rest of that nation's career depends; as, if for the moment the sense of common danger had broken down all the ordinary divisions of parties; and as if the world was' going to be astounded by the spectacle of.a national uprising as of one man to meet a gigantic and imminent national danger. The silence was at last broken, Mr. Lupton rose, to his feet. It was the exception that proved the rule: Mr. Lup-1 ton, solitary, independent of God or man, a law unto himself, was the one man with either the courage or the indifference to the environment to have ventured on the speech that broke up this solemn and affrighting silence. 'DIFFERENCES OF OPINION". Politicians rarely take quite" the same vie* of a speech as the outside world. It is the habit—it is almost tli e weakness—of their trade to seek for some personal motive behind the act and the word of every leading public man. Sometimes this leads to comments and points, of vjew that strike the outside observer as cynical; but it is the politician's inveterate and incurable habit, learned in" an atmosphere where men - of the most opposite opinions are accustomed,, at the (iining-table and in the snrbke-room, to discuss everything—including their own strongest convictions —from the point of view of experienced experts dealing with a great game. ' It is not that politicians are not quite as sincer e as other people; it is that, s'eated. as they are, inside the innermost ring of the political tempest, thcy are able to adjudge its changes with a cooler temper than the outsider, and that it is their business, after all, no'merely to profess and advocate opinions, but also to weigh and measure <!ic chances, tlie choice, and the complcxi- . ties of the battlefield on which thesis . conflicts of principles have, to be fought out. And, therefore, plenty of people saw in the speech of Mr. As'qnith -in allocution addressed rather to a group 01 his own friends I ban to his political opponents on the opposite side. FRICTION. ... His speech was criticised—especially by-the economical group—as a 'pveeh . for the prosecution, and not for the defence; that is to say. its a speech in favor of the policy of Mr. Balfour rather than in favor of the policy of hi; own . Ministry. For if things were a= bad as his speech seemed to indicate, then there was no answer to the demand of Mr. Balfour except that there should be eight Dreadnoughts laid down, and laid down at the first pebble money.t. It is a fact that there has been :• good deal of friction in the council- . ' : he Cabinet, over Ihis' question of the N'nvy.l There are notoriously two section, !n ; this Cabinet, as there have been in nearly every Cabinet that has ever pome, into existence. The Transvaal V'<r divided Camnbell-Ranncrman my! the pnup of which he was the =r.n'v-man from the other "roup 0 f which Vf. A--j fiuith. Mr. Haldane. and Sir Edward Grey were the chief mid most important members —now especially tint Lord Rosebery is. for the moment, out of the running. Probably if poor CD. hid been conscious of the "tremendous hold hj,. had upon the constituencies' and of the'overwhelming victory he was about |o achieve he would not have composed hU Cabinet, of the materials of which it afterwards consisted: it would ha.-e been a Cabinet .from which the irrouii known as the Liberal Leaguers would have been absent. . C.-B.'S PLA\ T OF CAMPAIGN'. - _ Rut C. : lt. had to make his Cabinet, just as he was goincr into a great battle. and it is one of the conditions of a successful battle that all the forces shall lie united. Therefore, a coalition Cabinet was imposed on C.-Ti. I'm- a time, as i* well known, it was uncertain whether C.-R. would have been able In have induced the Liberal Leaguer,- '.i have joined him at all. Mr. Haldane held out. Mr. Asquith was nneerlnh. Sir Edward Grev demanded thai ('. il. should go to the House of Lords and leave the direction of affairs in lh"j Commons to the Liberal League, and Lord Rosebery cut himself adrift, lint i

ftcv a few daiV conflict tin- Liberal ,ea»ucrs eninu 'into the fold, ami the Caiunet was niad« up of Hie very different anil rather oimllicting materials nt which it now consists. Hence it is that when sui-li a iiiu'stion as the size of tin' Xavy i-aino u]> fur discussion it U impossible feci- siu-li a Cabinet not to leave some keen, if not vehement, differences of opinion. skckkts <>k the cabinet. li ix not easy to know what takes plan- behind the closed door of Xo. 10, Oowning Street, when these big aiw momentous dilVoronci's are being fought out; but things trickle through, sometimes contradictory, sometimes in accord, and an experienced observer can, anyhow, by piecing tog-ether the different report,*, lmd out in a general kind of way what is going on. And this is my reading of the recent crisis: On the one hand, there was the programme of eight Dreadnoughts immediately ; on the other, of four immediately and four contingently. Th e firs't programme was that of the Liberal Leaguers; the second was that of the Hadical economists. The Liberal Leaguers were Sir. Asquith, Jlr. llaldane, Sir Edward Urey, and, for this purpose, Mr. McKeitna, the First Lord of the Admiralty r the economists were Lord Jlorley, Lloyd-George, Winston Churchill, and John Burns; th e rest of the Cabinet could not well be classified. They liste'ned to the discussions between' these formidable protagonists, and.they, voted when their minds were made up.. When 1 say they voted I use the term metaphorically. It is one of the peeu'iarities and traditions of the Cabinet that there are no divisions taken by vote; such an event happened sometimes in the .Ministries of Mr. (Ila.lstone, lint the old and better tradition has been returned to, and in the present Cabinet, I believe, there lias never been a division by vote. Then 1 never, certainly, was a division on the question between the four and eight Dreadnoughts; the question mis decided long ' before it came to that point, and thej

programme of tin- smaller number was .carried, but not bcfor,. tlu-i-i' was a very hard tussle. A MOMENT OF TENSION. While London was pursuing its tranquil way, while the House of Commons was engaged in the discussion of some small measure, while all the rest of (he world was concentrating its attention on the curious fight in whieh Mr. Gihso i | Howies was engaged in Glasgow, an I j the prolonged am l puzzling nosolhif i'ms, between him and the Irish loaders, there j was being fought out behind the plain,, even commonplace and middle-i In--. door which leads into Xo. 111. Dawning Street, one of the most dramatic and momentous struggles' of our contemporary history. Tin- two groups stood in open opposition to each other, and on their decision depomrod the fact whether or not we should have that very afternoon a great Ministerial crisis, with two, three, or four resignations, which would have thrilled tire whole world and led to one of the most decisive and fateful struggles in history. If the big programme had been carried the Ministry would have ceased to exist: for it would have been without three or four of its' greatest member*: and the struggle in which these members had been worsted would have been transferred to the constituencies ami to the House of Commons; and the mighty Liberal Party, with its gigantic majority, would have hern riven in two forces, bitterlv hostile to each other. But th P Liberal Leaguers did not wish to push it to such extremes, ami the four Dreadnoughts now and the four provisionally later on were accepted as' a compromise; and Mr. Asquith's Ministry once more came hack to life and unity. A GLANT.rvAROIJXD. These events must he known in order I to understand th 0 extraordinary inter-, pretations which were put on the speech' of Mr. Asquith. For it seemed as if he were fighting all over again the battle lie had been waging inside the Cabinet. a7id as if he were taking his vengeance for the defeat he had suffered at the hands of the little but determined Radical group. This, I have reason to believe, is an unfair interpretation of the s'peech and of its purpose. The truth is that in his eagerness to defend his programme from the critics on his own side—and thete were no fewer than 140 of tliem who had declared their determination to oppose any increase whatever of the fleet —Mr. Asquith overdid his case; he proved too much. For both he and Mr. McKenna, it is contended, managed to convey the impression that ,the "Dreadnoughts actually put out of existence the res't of the British Navy; until people. talking of Dreadnoughts, thought there wa* an end of the Riili.-h fleet if there wer P but one more Dreadnought in the fJenuan than in the I'ritish X'avv. Everybody thought there ought to be more Dreadnoughts in the English than in th P German Xavy; but when people recovered from the speech of Mr. Asquith tliev remembered that there were forty big batlleshiin still left in the! British Xavy which would he able to sweep the seas even if the German urn-: gramme were as cxr.cr.sive a- had lien supposed. A TEMPEST OF IT.ELIXG. And then the question ar,;-'e what would happen if Mr. Asquith were lo find that'his word- were taken liter-! ally? Perhaps neither he nor anybody ' else realised the perfect, tempest of folding which hi-* speech was going to create in the country. T do not believe we have ever had anything like it in the memory of a,r.' living man. Every class of English ',->- ciety. high and low. rich and poor, hav been dison-sing nothing but this nnvii programme since Mr. Asquith's' snooe 1 !. People tell me that their middle-aged female cooks are talking of nothing (■!*": and naturally from the ultra-patriotic point of view. Will this tempest of public feeling not compel Mr. A-,piiih in th" end to substitute for his curtailed programme the original programme of his Cabinet and the Liberal Leaguer-, and accept Mr. l'.aifour's proposal that 'the eight Dreadnoughts should be started at once? If Mr. Asquith were to do this, it is certain that the Cabinet would see the resignation of some of its members, and a Cabinet crisis would be added to the other excitement- of the moment. A QI'ESTTOX. Which „f the two groups-die Radicals or the Liberal Leaguers —would win? It i, a dillicult question to answer. There are men of groat ability, great courage, and great independence in the Liberal 1.-ague group, ami Sir Edward Grey is one of the most I'ormidablc of the group-though one of (he least obtrusive. Mr. Ilablanc has innnon-o powers of words; he is really more like an elephant that tramples under its' heavy I foot n mighty forest of trees than a being of llesli'and blood. And the gilts of Mr. Asquith as a Parliamentarian are marvellous, THE TITANS. But Lloyd-(Ti'orge and Winston Churchill are tremendous lighters. They are both young men—one forty-six. the other thirty-four. Thcv are'not the men who would take their beating lying down. From the Cabinet they would anpvnl to the country: from even the House of Commons to the eonstitucijei. .-. ami he would be a hold man who | would -av at what moment thcv would acknowledge that the light had gone against them. But for " the moment their light would perhaps be .hopeless; so long as this great tide of popular passion and feeling runs a- high as it does it would he dillicult for am man to breast it. And. anyhow, the indications f,,r the moment are thai Mr. A-qiiiih and liii comrades will stick to the compromise which was Bellied between then, ami the Radical group, and thai the Cabinet I will light as a whole and uniledly. And Mr. Balfour, by announcing ~ -..n,,. of censure, lias perhaps helped :,, ■:■,, the warring sections of hi, 1 oppo rents united. SIR JOHN FISHER. Meantime, as in all these di'-ptites, other personalities and other i-<n"- arcbeing gathered in.- And one of the personalities most involved i-' that of Sir •lohu, or, as 'all the world call, him,l •laoky Fisher. Mere is one of Hie men' of his time; bound to have inuinnornbl ;' ami relentless enemies; bound to have; innumerable friends and adiiiicci-.i Strong, n-olule. self-willed, cucrgciie ' ' to a degree that makes him a dynamo rather than a being of flesh and blood.,

Sir John Fi-hvr has attained tn something like ii dictatorship in th,. Xavy. Under liiui have been concentrated ail the powers' and commands which were formerly divided among several other admirals, and his word is law. This means that ho can promote or degrade every great ollieer in the Xavy, can \ transform and even revolutionise ship- ' building, tatties, the location of the ' fleet, everything anil anything connected '' with England's gigantic Xavy. He is a man whose restless energy j gives him enormous advantages over ' | tile ordinary limn, lie often gets' up at ■ i three or four o'clock in the morning; I Bid friends of his are quite accustomed j to his saying to them at nine o'clock in the evening that lie must go to bed and leave them because he had been up so early in the morning, and lias to be up again next morning at the same, ungodly hour. The man and his temperament are in perfect accord. Yon could not look- at him for a moment without gathering that lie was no ordinary man. Thick set, alert, with beady, d'nrk ( .vcs, with a bulldog jaw, and ii'tenacious mouth, with the sallow skin of the East, he looks just the taut sailor to the very finger-tips', who fears neither God un'r man, and spares no foe. no opponent, no obstacle. A GIANT STRUGGLE.. On him is concentrating at this moment the same storm as on the Govern- : ment. Two papers, like the Morning Post and the Daily Express, represent"t in? an important if not predominant section of (lip Unionist party, are .hammering away at him everv dav; and ; nobody doubts that they ;U 'e inspired by powerful inlluenees within the JCavv itself. It looks as if it were going io develop t into a light, with Sir John Fis'her on the one side and Lord Cliarhs lien-ford | . on the other. In short, we are living in 1 I big times, with wars of Titans' -,11; j around us.