The Naval Conference With the United States, Japan and France
all assenting in principle to the holding of a naval conference in London in the coming autumn, there is every prospect that a conference will be held. That the prospects of a satisfactory agreement emerging from it are bright it would be affectation to pretend. Each nation has its own policy and its own purposes to serve, and to reconcile them all will be a formidable task. Great Britain, abandoning the hope of global limitation, wants qualita- tivc reduction, i.e., a limitation on the size of different types of vessel. Japan desires a lower total tonnage figure than exists at present, with the idea of achieving parity with the United States by bringing the American fleet clown to her own level ; but agreement on that point is almost beyond hope. France's standard will be to some extent determined by the Anglo-German agree- ' ment fixing the size of the German fleet at 35 per cent. of our own. The intentions of Italy in her present mood cannot be predicted. A fundamental fact is that the capital ship fleets of Britain, Japan and the United States will all be obsolete when the Washington Agree- ment expires at the end of this year with the exception of one or two individual vessels (including the two ships each which France and Italy are building under the Washington Agreement) and that to replace them would lay an intolerable strain on the resources of this country and the United States; 'to say nothing Of Japan. For that reason there is some faint hope that the 'advocates of capital .ships of ten or twelve thousand tons may yet get a hearing.
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