Disarmament
HE result of the plenary session of the Naval Limitation Conference at Geneva on Thursday will presumably reach our readers through the daily papers at the same time as the Spectator, which must be printed before any news arrives on Thursday night. We earnestly hope that reason and good will may prevail. We know that both will be shown to the full by Mr. Bridgeman and Lord Cecil. It has seemed almost incredible that the invitation of President Coolidge, the entirely right and proper sequel to President Harding's initiative in summoning the Washington Conference, should be nullified and rendered worse than ridiculous (because a negative failure in such a good quest becomes a positive harm) by instructions from Washington to the United States delegates at Geneva to give no con- sideration to the new facts that they have learnt about the needs of Great Britain and the uses to which she puts His Majesty's ships. No one can say that Great Britain has not tried to adapt her original proposals in such a way as to meet what her delegates have learnt of the desires and expectations of the United States. Japan, so far as we can see, has been reasonable and accommodating throughout and her delegates have tried in every way to bring about agreement. There was every justification last April for our saying, as we did of this Conference, that " between the three Powers the will to agree will be present."
On Thursday that statement will have been confirmed or proved to have been too optimistic. We are bound to admit now that there is evident and serious chance that the three great Naval Powers will not, on this occasion, come to any agreement to extend the Washing- ton agreement from capital ships to cruisers and 'smaller vessels, or to reduce naval expenditure further in concert. If that be so, it is the duty of all to see how such a disappointing result can be made to do the least harm. In the first place the Governments concerned must be made to see that their peoples will not accept this failure as final ; that they are expected to go on planning at home to produce schemes that will be acceptable to the other two Governments.
Secondly, it is the duty of us all to see that no harm ensues to the main movement towards Disarmament as conducted by the League of Nations. Our hope was that the Conference of the three Powers would result in a kind of agreement analogous to what is called a regional pact, reached by the three naval Powers and offering both a moral encouragement and a technical model for the larger scheme. We have looked to it to be a limited but most useful step along the road which must, as we fully recognize, be travelled slowly if it is to be travelled surely. The Preparatory Com- mittee on Disarmament has done admirable work in spite of discouragements that might have daunted lesser men than Lord Cecil and some of his colleagues. People may say that there is not yet much to show for all their work. But there is. There is a clearer road ahead. The Committee has proved several roads to be false tracks. Is -that of no use in a new departure into untrodden spheres of international politics ? The difficulties are mainly due to the several needs that nations feel most important for themselves but which others do not fully realize. In his Report of the last Session of the Preparatory Committee Lord Cecil was able to say, " Even with regard to the sea, the differences can scarcely be considered irreconcilable." Until they were discovered there was no chance of reconciling them. Now there is the opportunity. If more differences have been revealed at Geneva during the past month,' there are so many less to be discovered by the Pre- paratory Committee. That, we are sure, is the way in which Lord Cecil will regard his work. Further, the work of that Committee is only naval in part and this Geneva Conference has been purely -naval. To us, with our Army reduced to a minimum required for the Empire and India and with our traditions of the seas naval reduction may seem the principal and most debatable matter in disarmament. But that is not true of Continental nations too. There the main interest in naval reductions, though not• the only one, lies in the objection of the chief military Powers to giving up any supremacy on land while Great Britain keeps any supremacy at sea. The Conference has proved, to all who are willing to believe it, that Great Britain gave up supremacy at Washington more than five years ago, and is only determined to keep up a necessary minimum of naval units from which, as some nations realize, they and their trade have gained and stand to gain as much as we do. A more serious obstacle than British " navalism " lies in Russia. You cannot expect her neighbours to reduce armaments with much con- fidence while she is said to have a vast host under arms and a possible need to use it to unite her peoples and distract them at any moment from Muscovite methods of government, nor while she screams that war with somebody is imminent.
But the Preparatory Committee must go on undis- mayed. We cannot here go into the differences between the French and British schemes that they have dis- cussed already. Nor need we harp upon the moral duty of the representatives of nations mainly Christian and civilized, or on the fears for the future that the -last War has put into men's hearts. But let us remind them that they have the European taxpayer behind them. No one denies that the present unproductive expenditure is ruinous. We do not mean that we think a financial formula the best on which to base reduction of armaments, though it is one to be taken into account. Formulae altogether are untrustworthy and have lost reputation during the past month. Something of the kind is inevitable where agreements have to be put on paper, but the less we trust to them, and the more we invoke good will, the better. We would lastly remind the Committee and the peoples behind them that they cannot honourably slacken their efforts, because this is a matter of fulfilling treaty obligations. The Covenant of the League is a Treaty, and Article VIII. enjoins this task upon us all. It is a treaty obligation, too, under the Treaties of Versailles, St. Germain, the Trianon, and others, for the naval, military and air clauses were expressly said to be inserted " in order to render possible the initiation of a general limitation of the armaments of all nations." Further, in the Notes that passed between the Allied and Associated Powers and Germany in May and June, 1919, the Germans said that they would agree to those clauses " provided this is a beginning of a general reduction of armaments." The Powers answered that the clauses were " the first steps towards that general reduction and limitation of armaments which they seek to bring about as one of the most fruitful preventives of war, and which it will be one of the.first duties of the League of Nations to promote." By the side of these considerations a failure in the Naval Limitation Conference over a word—parity—should count as a China orange beside alt Lombard Street.
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