MINISTERIAL PROGRAMME.

Evening Post, Volume LXXVII, Issue 109, 10 May 1909, Page 7

MINISTERIAL PROGRAMME.

AN EPOCH OF STEADY BUILDING. LONDON, 9th May. Mr. Winston Churchill, speaking at Oxford yesterday, said : "It is certain that we are in for an epoch, not of panic building, but of steady building. It is deplorable that the nations 'should spend money in this way., It is impossible that the severe strain can be borne by every State, but it will not be Britain that will be the first to show herself unequal to the strain." (Cheers.) '' Happily," continued the speaker, " free trade will enable us, unhampered by tariff laws, and without the status of any class in the country being sensibly affected, to maintain an ample and j effective superiority in sea power over every likely combination." Speaking at the Reform Club, Mr. Lewis Ha-rcourt, First Commissioner of Works, said that, though the country should have abundant security, it was a crime to build more ships than were necessary. Commenting upon the utterance, the Daily News declares that there is no intention among sensible men to build against phantom fleets or imaginary alliances. In an interview published in the Standard, Mr. Lloyd-George, Chancellor of the Exchequer, declared that the Navy must be the first charge on any realised surplus in 1910.