Our Difference With America

Dominion, Volume 22, Issue 81, 29 December 1928, Page 13

Our Difference With America

THERE are two things we, who desire peace, seem to have forgotten —or else, if we have not forgotten them, we find it better to push out of sight, should ever they turn up when we are raking over the past. One is that the generation which now would be contributing fresh energies and new ideas to polities is mainly nothing but cemeteries; and the other is, that the old political intelligence and conscience which made the war inevitable, and also conducted it and man the peace which followed it, is still, for the most part, in control of European affairs. Hence such futilities as the Geneva Conference, where martial men and Imperialists failed to agree because they did not go there to conform to the desires and needs of a changed world, but to see how much they could retain of their old position in some hard bargaining. e ought to know that there never will be a world of nations pursuing, in reasonable security, their peaceful and legitimate occasions, if these pious conferences are composed of peace-makers whose sole desire is to retain all the ships and guns they can compel the other parties to concede. It would be ridiculous to appoint brewers and distillers to discuss for the public good the regulating of the drink traffic; so why expect admirals to reduce fleets and soldiers to lay down their arms with a gesture of Christian resignation. If they did so they would be betraying their office, the Institution of Mai, which we pay them to maintain. Quite properly they put their trust in that imposing institution, which absorbs most of the public taxes, and wine i the public still honours,-out of old habit, more than it does the Church or the Temple of Athena.

Nevertheless, there are changes in the world to which even our admirals will have to adjust themselves. Among President Wilson’s famous list of points for consideration at Versailles there was one called Freedom of the Seas. This the British delegates did not wish to discuss; to us the seas are free, and so we fail to understand what foreigners mean when they raise the question of freedom there. But President Milson knew, though he dropped that point, as lie did all the other points, except that relating to the League of Nations; but every intelligent American knows what President Wilson was after, but failed to get. By freedom of the seas, foreigners understand the surrender by the British of our socalled right to hold-up for inspection the ships of neutral nations in wartime, to capture them if we think it advisable, and to exclude from the coasts of our enemy the traffic of neutral nations.

In all the acrimonious discussions which go on in the British and the American Press over one question and another, the root of the trouble is never mentioned. Most of our own publicists ignore the point; our Admiralty, naturally, is blandly unaware that such a difficulty exists; you never hear it mentioned during a Parliamentary debate; and the various correspondents in the United States of the British Press know full well that editors want cablegrams composed of more exciting news than anything arising out of one of a dead President’s forgotten desires. So when there is disagreement at Geneva between the naval experts of the two countries, and they part not only with nothing done but leaving such a

dark doubt as a consequence of their difference that observers, here as well as in America, begin to get nervous of the future, we English cannot ‘make it out, and wonder what it is the Americans want. We had better be candid with ourselves. All the world is in agreement with America over our claim to be allowed the freedom to starve an opponent into submission. Up to now no other Power has been strong enough to challenge our right to do this; for our right consists of no more than our ability to apply a blockade to an offending country. Well, for the first time in our history, such a Power has now arisen. America candidly advises us that it knows nothing of our right to blockade, but that it will trade, as a neutral, with any power with which we may happen to be at war.

Our Admiralty knew perfectly well at the time of the Versailles conference that the weakest point in the defence of these islands is our sea communications. Germany affected our trade routes disastrously with submarines, though her battleships were in' port. Did our Admiralty greet President Wilson’s suggestion of our release from a position we could no longer maintain with the gratitude it deserved from them? No. The President’s point concerning the freedom of the seas, though all to the advantage of the British, and in accord with reason, and dictated by the obvious developments in material science, was snuffed out. It was so notably directed to peace, and not to the establishment of war,. therefore it simply disappeared, and now is never mentioned.

Had our Admiralty advisors at the Peace Conference counselled the gracious acceptance of that point they, would have saved us from a humiliation which now we must swallow, and all this trouble with the United States would not have arisen. Now our Admiralty is aware that it cannot insist on its right, and would not dare to claim it. if challenged; and that if it blackened the sea with its warships it would' be just as impotent. America made the offer, to have it rejected and her President humiliated. Now—as our statesmen and naval experts might have foreseen— she tells us she does not care whether or not we claim such a right, because, for her part, she won’t pay any attention to it.

And there we are. Across the ocean to-day, at a distance which aeroplanes will soon be able to manage well enough, is a great nation, of English speech, of English foundations, which is able to talk to Whitehall at least on equal terms, and to talk with a bluntness which Whitehall finds most unusual and discordant. The difficulties which have arisen between us and that country have been brought about because our statesmen and our advisory officials, who are generally slower in learning a new lesson than the man in the street, not realising that goodwill might serve them better than a ti’eat of guns, still went on, in a changed world, with the old arguments based on their unalterable faith in force. Perhaps they are sorry now they did. Certainly we are. The next time we give France advice about evacuating German territory, or America a sneer or two over her insistence on the reality of the figures of the debts, let us remember to ask ourselves why it is we do not seem to be loved so much as we feel we deserve. —H. M. Tomlinson, in “St. Martin’s Review.”