WHAT HAS BRITAIN DONE?

Clutha Leader, Volume XLII, Issue 79, 7 April 1916, Page 8

WHAT HAS BRITAIN DONE?

The question is rather effectively answered by the 'Wall Street Journal,' Xew York, which says:—"Her Navy, her financial credit, and a sm'all Expeditionary Army were all that were asked by the Allies. They would have been entirely contented with these, hut Groat. Britain gave infinitely more. Her Navy wiped the Gorman menace from the seas. It locked up the vaunted Gorman Navy, which, without Great Britain's participation, could have battered l'Vinoo into submission in a fortnight. It hks removed the submarine peril far more effectively than any of the wordy admonitions of Washington. Hut instead of her first Kxpeditionnrv Armv, which totalled 1S0.II0I) men'instead of the 12o,()(>() expected, she has plai-d upwards of I.DDO.IHii) men in the field, without counting the colonial and Indian troops, and ha.s 2,00(1,(!()() more in readiness. Hut her service, in this instance voluntary, merely begins hero. She is the principal guarantor for .a credit in the I'nitod States of tL'(l(),()00,l.)00 and lias lent large sums to the Allies. What has Groat Britain done? What hasn't she donor 1 By her own enlightened system of colonial government the Boers have wiped out the German colony in South-West Africa, the From h-Canad-ians are lighting on the Belgian frontier, the Irish are, characteristically, lighting in the thickest of the fray, lind the supposed seditious Hindoos and Mahonimedans are cleaning up all the Gorman political gains in Turkish Asia. And there is more than this. If it were not for the British mastery of the seas where would our own export trade bor' Kven with lin uncertainty on the ocean, the trade which our short-sighted politicians grudge to the Allies, because Germany is in no position to receive it. would not exist at all. To leave out of the argument the inviolability of treaties and the rights of neutral and _pe«aeelul nations, all the moral issues involved, on the plain question of advantage to our present and future interests, can we ask ourselves with any show of consistency or plausibility—What has Circat Britain done?