In the House of Lords on Tuesday Lord Brassey called
attention to the shipbuilding programme for the Navy in an excellent speech, and elicited an important statement on naval administration from Lord Selborne. After some remarks on the close connection between sound finance and a strong Navy, the First Lord stated that the offer, made originally by Lord Goschen, and repeated by Mr. Ritchie, to reduce our rate of shipbuilding if other nations agreed to do the same had never been withdrawn, but the recent growth of great navies rendered the conditions of the case far more complicated. The two-Power standard remained a con- venient one for battleships, but owing to the peculiar and Imperial duties of the British Admiralty, it never was really applicable to cruisers and torpedo craft. No other Admiralty in the world had to consider, besides safeguarding the country from invasion, the fact that the nation's food supply depended on the Navy.
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