The Naval Treaty
In the House of Lords on Tuesday Lord Beatty and Lord Jellicoe opened all their guns on the Naval Treaty. Lord Beatty could not understand how the Admiralty had consented to make the minimum number of cruisers fifty instead of seventy. In his opinion, Great Britain is in a " position of inferiority." He begged that the Treaty might even now be rejected or that at least the saving clause (which allows more building upon a declar- ation that France and Italy are undertaking an unexpect- edly large programme of construction) should be acted Upon. Lord Jellicoe agreed with Lord Beatty that our security was gone. Lord Thomson very reasonably resisted the demand that the Government should disclose the exact nature of the advice given by the Admiralty. If this were done, he said, no expert would ever give an impartial opinion again. It was enough to know that the consent of the Admiralty to what had been done had actually been obtained. For the rest Lord Thomson argued cogently that the technical dangers which Lord Beatty and Lord Jellicoe had described could not be compared with the much greater danger of a competition in naval armaments.
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