FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXXIII, Issue 37, 13 February 1937, Page 8

FOUR HUNDRED MILLIONS.

The total estimated expenditure on tlie British defence services in .1936-37 .is £177,570,000— about 50 millions more than was expended in the preceding year. How much will be provided for the same purposes from ordinary revenue sources in the financial year which begins on April 1 will not be known until the next Budget statement, but it has been realised for several months that it will be impracticable to meet the total cost of the rearmament programme from revenue alone. The Government therefore proposes now to secure Parliamentary authority to raise a total sum of 400 million pounds in the next five years. The limits on the sums to be borrowed mid on the period of borrowing are not final, but "may be modified by Parliamentary enactment if conditions so require."

This colossal proposal may be regarded both as a plain indication to the British public, the Empire and the world of the grave view which the Government takes of the threat to peace, and as a gesture to the Powers whose policies threaten peace. It is, in part at least, an intimation and a warning to such Powers that if the only argument which they will recognise and respect is piled-up armaments, then Britain can use that argument too. As a gesture it may be--let us hope that it will be—exceedingly influential, for it is not an idle one. "If it must come to a competitive arms race," the British' Government is saying in effect, "we can last longer than any of you." That international relationships should have reached the pass at which such a decision was 'orced upon the Government of the nation vhich, with the United States, is' the most peace-loving in the world, is in the last degree deplorable , . That the decision may be justified by results—by a realisation among the Powers ( threatening peace that the policy upon which they have embarked is going to be too costlymust be the hope of everyone, and most of all of the people who may have to pay for it, Meanwhile, interest is likely to be intensified | in the progress of the whole rearmament j programme. Up till now the Government has tried to carry it on by methods o£ voluntary co-operation, so as to cause a "minimum of dislocation" to the ordinary life of the nation. Wiil the factors which have induced the latest decision oblige it also to introduce measures of compulsion?