A Naval Holiday ?
The report that President Hoover has the idea of pro- posing a two years' naval holiday as America's contribution to the Disarmament Conference appears to rest on no very solid foundation. That does not mean that it is not a sound idea, or that Mr. Hoover may not be turning it over in his mind. The report indeed looks singularly like a kite sent up to see which way the winds are blowing —in this case in the various capitals concerned. In London, at any rate, weather conditions ought not to be unfavourable. A two years' holiday now would leave us in a considerably stronger position in relation to the United States itself than we shall be two years hence, if building on the scale laid down in the London Treaty is carried through, for America is at present engaged in reducing her inferiority to us in eight-inch and six-inch gun cruisers. A holiday, moreover, would give time for the still uncomposed differences between France and Italy on naval construction to be adjusted. America speaks with peculiar authority in the international forum at present, particularly on questions directly or indirectly involving finance, and if she suggested that a world which under the Kellogg Pact has renounced war might. for two years suspend the construction of certain instruments of war, there would be something more than the formal logic of the proposal to commend it. There are obvious difficulties, but there are also partial precedents.
