Sea Politics
THE First Lord of the Admiralty, introducing in the House of. Commons last week the Navy Estimates, made a speech of peculiar importance, because its interest was not confined to details, of Naval administration and expenditure. The cost of the Navy would alone make the policy of the Admiralty a burning question- for every taxpayer to-day, but the Navy's place in international relations is even more a pressing question of the moment. Mr. Bridgeman haslittle of the subtlety of the more usual kind of politician, and his transparent honesty rejoices the heart of the ordinary stupid Briton like ourselves. Will other nations believe, that ? We fear not; fo they insist, on flattering us by erediting !us with much sharper and more prescient with than, we possess, or at any rate than- we trust enough to put in high places for very long. Naturally, Mr. Bridgeman had to refer to the Conference summoned to Geneva by President Coolidge, He ex.' plained once more that if he had accepted the American standard of cruisers of 10,000 tons he would have made" his country liable for enormous expenditure, which we did not need to incur for our Navy and its non-aggressive work ; and that he would have returned from .4 Conference, whose purpose was to limit armaments, having agreed to increase them considerably. We can think of politicians who might assent to a patent absurdity like that and might almost enjoy an exercise of ingenuity to explain it away. Not so Mr. Bridgeman. Again, it may be an amusing intellectual game to try to establish relations between things not really comparable. But Mr. Bridgeman is no sophist either in the best or the worst sense of the word. When he found that the discussions around " parity " were futile because we needed numbers of ships rather than size, while the United States wanted size rather than numbers, so that no single formula could possibly comprehend the needs, he simply said so. He has had reason to complain a good deal of misrepresentation here and in the United ptates, but let him take comfort in thinking what a far worse flood of misunderstanding would have arisen round a more ingenious negotiator than himself. Of course, he has borne the greatest share of the disappoint- ment that all honest people felt at the failure. The Washington Conference had been a great success in 1922. Great Britain, who had already voluntarily " scrapped " 1,300,000 tons of shipping between the Armistice and the Washington Conference, went on " scrapping " pars passti with the United States and the other signatories. We all hoped for a leap forward at Geneva. Great Britain had notions , of abolishing submarines, of abolishing all cruisers larger than are necessary in the defence of trade, and so on. But the disappointment has grown no greater since Geneva, and encouraging results of the Conference are beginning to appear.
That may sound audacious to those who have only seen in the results of the Geneva Conference an encourage- ment to the Big Navy Party in the United States to intimidate their Government into accepting a fantastic proposal of naval expansion. America, like Great Britain, will keep to the letter and the spirit of the Washington Treaty. Otherwise, since the Geneva Con- ference failed, both are perfectly free. We here are going to measure our fleets not by anyone else's, but according to our needs at sea, building as little as we need pay for, as much as we need to protect trade routes with men-of- war, cruisers, sloops, &c., of no greater size than necessary, of no smaller number than necessary. So it is with the United States with her different needs, and we shall not complain or expect her to listen to advice from us. Let her believe that we fully realize that she has got great coast-lines which may now be said to stretch to Panama ; that she has Pacific dependencies ; that she has not in the past had to provide fuelling stations for her ships, which must therefore carry a greater bulk than ours. In some respects, we can say that the bigger her Navy and the more efficient, the better pleased we should be. This would especially be so if, as we lately suggested when writing on the subject of the Freedom of the Seas in war time, it were proclaimed to the world that in a future war the great Navies of the Atlantic would be found co-operating in preventing anarchy at sea, and stifling the fighting on land by upholding International Law and preventing neutrals from aiding belligerents to prolong the horror.
What is happening in Washington to assuage our dis- appointment over the General Conference ? On the day on which Mr. Bridgeman introduced the estimates here, the House of Representatives was debating a Naval Bill there. It was not a Bill for laying down the seventy- one vessels of which we heard so much, but for fifteen cruisers and one aircraft-carrier. One of the principal speakers thought this far too big a programme. On the next day that House was seriously worried by the Chair- man of the Sub-Committee on Naval Appropriations, who made a cold calculation of the costs, not only the initial. capital costs, but of the upkeep of vessels and the sub- sidiary expenditure on .sea and ashore entailed by a larger Fleet. The next day when the measure was sent to the Senate, a section was added encouraging the executive to promote a further International Conference for the Limitation of Armaments and empowering the President to modify the programme in accordance with the results of any such Conference. Mr. Bridgeman was able to say last Friday that President Coolidge, as well as H.M.'s Government, was " ready to go on considering limitation." Furthermore, we learnt last week that Admiral Jones was travelling post-haste to Geneva. Why ? He is expected to arrive just in time to be too late for the meetings of the Preparatory Commission on Disarmament, at which the United States are represented by his efficient substitute, Admiral Long. We can only connect his journey with the Geneva Tripartite Conference, with the President's readiness to consider limitation, and with Mr. Kellogg's sustained activity in the cause of security through agreements. Can any reasonable person doubt that Admiral Jones and Mr. Hugh Gibson will discuss together at Geneva the ways of approaching other Powers on matters that include the limitation of naval arma- ments ? We already begin to think that the withdrawal of the parties from the Geneva Conference will prove to have been but a step back before a greater leap forward.
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