TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE NAVY DEBATE. THE most serious and the most alarming facts dis- closed by the debate of Tuesday last on the Navy, were the lines of action taken respectively by Mr. Glad- stone and Sir William Harcourt. Mr. Gladstone was in ono of his most characteristic moods. Many years ago it was said of him, by one who was then among his most devoted followers, that he was the greatest master of debate ever seen, because, when his party was manifestly worsted on the merits of the case, he could at a moment's notice select some minute point in the action of his oppo- nents, and attack it with such earnestness and indignant virtue that the tables seemed suddenly to be turned, so that, whilst the men behind him, who had felt themselves before to be in a hopeless dilemma, became exultant, his oppo- nents were reduced to a feeble tone of apology. Sir William Harcourt, on the other hand, is probably of all living statesmen the man who can most perfectly absorb expert evidence, and speak for his own purposes with a more complete knowledge of technical subjects, whether military or naval, than any soldier or sailor. There must have been some at the debate who heard him explain how he had, been spending days at the Admiralty going carefully into the question under discussion, to whom the words must have recalled that famous court- martial on Colonel Crawley, which first assured Sir William's public reputation. To begin with, in certain secondary, and not very im- portant, points, he was wholly in the right as to his facts ; and those who have been stating the case for the increased Navy were, we must say, with not very excusable careless- ness, altogether wrong. Thus—after the great meeting in the City—Mr. Arnold Forster earnestly begged all those who were present to take possession of certain literature on the subject which, he assured them, was to be relied upon in every particular. Yet in the sheet giving the battle-ships of European Powers, the 'Inflexible' and Dreadnought are classified as first-class battle-ships ; the Barfieur," Centurion,' and Collingwood ' as second- class battle-ships. According to the Navy Lists, published for months before the meeting and the debate, and there- fore not possibly cooked for the purpose of either, the exact reverse is the fact. The two first-named ships are second-class, the three latter are first-class. More- over, according to the figures given by the Chambers of Commerce sheet, it is difficult to imagine on what principle any other classification could have been made. When, then, at the extreme end. of the debate Sir William calmly recited by name the first-class battle-ships which he included in his statement, it is not difficult to imagine what confusion he carried into the opposing ranks. If these lists of Mr. Forster's had been incorrectly drawn up, on what were they to depend as accurate ? It was very necessary that even at the eleventh hour Mr. Goshen should protest that, as Sir William's lists had, according to his statement, been ready for three weeks, they ought to have been laid before the House at an earlier period, and not in what was intended to be the last speech of the debate. Even as it is, we have not now the complete statement of the building going on by foreign Powers on which Sir William relied. On the real question, the broad issue of the actual safety of the country, Mr. Gladstone conclusively showed that the subject is so dis- tasteful to him that he has not mastered it at all. Sir William as completely showed that he understood it well, and recklessly used an advocate's privilege to lead the House and the country off the true scent. In the first place, Sir William quietly assumed that the whole of our available first-class battle-ships,are, or would be at the moment of war, concentrated in the Mediter- ranean. He scouted the idea of our having to evacuate that sea when we had all these ships there, whereas the only ground on which experts have ever declared that it would be necessary at the beginning of war to withdraw our ships to Gibraltar is the fact that it is certain that at that moment, these ships would not be there. They are not there now, and Sir William's calculations assume that on the outbreak of war we shall be able to send every available ship to the Mediterranean. Yet no one knows better than he does that the com- merce throughout the weld which our Navy will have to defend, must reqiiire a protection such as the French commerce has no need of. All this miserable clap-trap about the way in which in former days one English ship was good enough for two Frenchmen, ignores all the facts of the Great War. When at the very beginning of it we had the opportunity, because of civil broils, of seizing that very harbour of Toulon, which is now the great gathering-place of the French Fleet, and then contained the better portion of it; when French naval officers could hardly main- tain any authority without being dragged before revo- lutionary tribunals, it was small wonder if we were able to drive them off the seas. When once all their crews had been prevented by the blockade, which we were thus able to establish, from ever exercising at sea, it was small wonder if we beat them in action after action. In the days of Suffren, the story was a very different one. Sir Charles Dilke was the only man in the House who seemed ready to face the facts of even our present position. We cannot afford, for the safety of the eountry, to amuse ourselves with these blatant phrases which probably de- ceive no one less than Sir William Harcourt himself.. They are capital appeals to the jury. To any judge they are not merely unimpressive; they disclose a sinister. willingness to run the risk of disaster trusting to the chapter of accidents. The speech would not be half so. dangerous as it is, if it did not exhibit such a plausible- capacity for making the worse appear the better cause.. It does not seem to us that any of the party leading articles we have seen, in the least do justice to it in this respect.
As to the future, the whole question turns upon the standard that is to be aimed at. Sir William has shown,. we think, that the Hamilton programme did fairly what was expected of it. It has not placed our Navy in such a condition that, were war declared to-morrow, it would be possible to close up hostile fleets within their ports, or leave us adequate cruisers both for protecting our com- merce and for scouting purposes. It has left us with a very great inferiority in torpedo-boats. It in no wise meets those dangers to which Sir Charles Dilke drew attention, in which he certainly expressed the conviction of many able French sailors, who believe that a e superiority of our sailors as such, which they do not dispute, will no longer be the determining factor of naval warfare, but that skill in construction and in mechanics, in which they think that they surpass us, will determine. victory or defeat. It has left us for the moment with a decided superiority in battle- ships. That standard, however, inadequate as it is,. is one to which Sir William objected when in Opposi- tion. There is not the smallest pretence in his or in any other speech delivered during the debate that Russia and France together are not now expending in new construction £2,500,000 per annum more than we are. All allusion to that all-important fact was carefully suppressed by him, being ingeniously covered over by a mass of irrelevant details. No attempt to meet the fact is to be made till the new Estimates have passed the House next year. When those Estimates are framed, they are to be based on the assumption that we must not dare to do too much lest we should tempt Russia and France to do yet more, and in the meantime the country is to be cajoled by appeals to its national vanity, based on false analogies from the history of the past. For our own parts, it would be idle to deny that the effect of the whole debate has been to produce a sense of depression and anxiety. Is England ultimately to succumb to skill in debate ? Are "debating advantages" habitually to be so taken by our statesmen against the interests of the country as to determine our fate ?
For, after all, there was one advantage of this kind among the many that were recklessly seized by Mr. Gladstone and Sir William Harcourt which was more sinister than any. Throughout his speech, Sir William emphasised the assumption, which he has since been compelled to qualify in a manner fatal to the effect of his speech, that the data he put forward were those derived from his advisers at the Admiralty. He managed to make it sound as if all that he said was approved by them, though he cautiously avoided saying so. We believe that that plausible way of putting the matter disguised the fact that he is deliberately going counter to their advice. The most anxious minds at this moment in the Kingdom are, we believe, those of the Naval Lords of the Admiralty. As a study of what, under these circum- stances, is possible in debate, Sir William's reply to Mr. Chamberlain is a masterpiece.
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