THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1926. AN OPPORTUNITY WASTED.

Wairarapa Age, 18 February 1927, Page 4

THE Wairarapa Age MORNING DAILY. FRIDAY, FEBRUARY 18, 1926. AN OPPORTUNITY WASTED.

On behalf of France, M. Briand has declined President Coolidge's invitation to a disarmament conference. The dispatch in which this momentous decision is conveyed is phrased with all the art and skill for which the French Foreign Minister is noted, but the decision is none the less to be regretted. M. Briand

makes much of a contention that the League of Nations was not working when the Washington Conference met in 1921, and that it is now the duty of the League to secure the general limitation of armaments. It is fairly obvious, however, that the League was strengthened and not weakened by the action taken by the leading naval Powers at Washington, and that the League would again be strengthened if these Powers were now able to agree upon a further limitation of navdl armaments. Either of the two stipulations which the French delegates have induced the League Disarmament Committee at Geneva to accept in principle blocks for the time being any further progress in limiting armaments. One of these stipulations is that it is impossible to limit navies without limiting land and air forces; the other is that the limitation of navies is only achievable by the allocation to each Power of a total tonnage for division according to requirements. As to the first of these stipulations, it is clear that until Russia has undergone a sweeping transformation, Franco and some other European Powers will refuse to go as far as they otherwise might be willing to go in limiting land and air armaments. There would be much better hopes of dealing separately with the

question of naval armaments, but trance refuses to allow this question to be. handled separately. The proposal that naval limitation should be on an aggregate tonnage basis means that some Powers would be allowed to concentrate their resources’ chiefly on the construction of submarines and other commerce destroyers. From the British standpoint, such a proposal carries its own condemnation on being stated. By her present stand, France is de-

stroying what appeared to be a promising opportunity of making new progress in naval limitation. At the Wash-

ington Conference, France took the lead in opposing the limitation of naval units other than capital ships. Under the policy stated by M. Briand she is making any progress whatever in the limitation of armaments impossible. That is the position which has to be faced to-day. Any prospect of early improvement in this state of affairs rests on the rather slender hope that America as a financial Power may bo able, directly and indirectly, to impose ,

such pressure on France as will indueo her to modify her uncompromising and obstructive attitude.