EQUALITY OF NAVIES.

Ellesmere Guardian, Volume XLV, Issue 3174, 6 December 1927, Page 4

EQUALITY OF NAVIES.

"In British eyes, the American demand for equality at sea strikes at the very root of British power, as well as security, in the world. If we have the ships to 'wage neutrality," to use Mr. Wilson's phrase, then Britain is relatively helpless in the face of a Continental opponent with a large land force. We become in a very definite sense the champions of a form of inter national law which is fatal to all British traditional power, and even security, '' says Mr Frank H. Simonds, in the American Review of Reviews. "There is the root of the whole naval dispute between the British and ourselves. On that day on which we actually attain real equality on the blue water, we and not the British will be in a position to determine the course of any new world conflict. Our fleet will not be used against the British, but the fact of our fleet in being will utterly transform the whole character of British action. It may even be that this fact will force them to fall back upon the Continental system of a large standing army. At bottom, the whole British feeling rests upon the belief that we do not need a navy and they do, and that our demano for a navy equal to theirs carries withit the most serious of menaces to them. And in that they are perfectly right Once we have our equal navy the British see that if a European war should break and they are involved, their existence would depend upon our attitude toward maritime law. And all our material interests would obvi-

ously dictate that we should defend

every detail of our rights to trade abroad, even when those rights themselves imperilled British security for even existence;"