CURRENT TOPICS.

Taranaki Daily News, 1 March 1916, Page 4

CURRENT TOPICS.

WHAT HAS BRITAIN' DOXE! This question is rather effectively answered by the Wall Street Journal, Xeiv York, which says:—"Her Navy, her iinancial credit, and a small expeditionary army were all that Were asked by the Allies. They would have been entirely contented with these, but Great Britain gave infinitely more. Her Navy wiped the German menace from the seae. It locked up the vaunted Germany navy, 1 which, without Great Britain's participation, could have battered France, into .submission in a fortnight. It has removed the submarine peril far more effectively than any of the words of admonition of Washington. But instead of her first expeditionary army, which totalled ISO,OOO men instead of the 125,000 expected, she has placed upwards of 1,000,000 men in the field, without counting the colonial and Indian troops, and iias 3,000,000 more in readiness. But her service, in this instance voluntary, merely begins here. She is the principal guarantor for a credit in the United States of £200,000,000, and has lent large sums to her Allies. What has Great Britain done? What hasn't she done? By her own enlightened system of colonial government the Boers have wiped out the German colony in South-west. Africa, the French-Canadians are fighting on the Belgian frontier, the Irish are, characteristically, fighting in the thickest of the fray, and the supposed seditious Hindoos and Mohammedans are cleaning up all the German political gains in Turkish Asia. And there is more than this. If it were not for the British mastery of the seas, where would our own export trade be? Even with an uncertainty oil the ocean, the trade which our short-sighted politicians grudge to the Allies, because Germany in no position to receive it, would not exist at all. To leave out of the argument the inviolability of treaties and the rights of neutral and peaceful nations, all the moral issues involved, on the main question of advantage to our present and future interests, can we ask ourselves, with any show of consistency or plausibility—What has Great Britain done?