Mr. Churchill, in making his statement on the Naval Estimates
on Wednesday. expressed his fears that there was no prospect of avoiding large and continuing increases in the Naval Estimates unless the present period of acute rivalries and rapid scientific expansion came to an end, but of all nations we were perhaps best able to bear the strain. At the same time a concerted effort to arrest the evil and insensate folly of what was now taking place should surely be the first of international objects, and he suggested as a way out that all the Great Powers should take a naval holiday for a year, so far as construction was concerned. It was not an appeal from weakness, but from strength. He cordially welcomed the marked improvement of our relations with Germany, and deprecated scaremongering or bluster, but issued a caveat against reading into recent German naval declarations a meaning which we should like, but which they did not possess. Nor ought we to seek to tie the German naval policy down to our own wishes by too precise inter- pretations of friendly language used by Germany with a good and reassuring purpose.
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