CLIMBING DOWN.

Lyttelton Times, Volume CXV, Issue 16551, 15 May 1914, Page 6

CLIMBING DOWN.

Probably it was only for the purpose of brushing away some of the misstatements of his political opponents that Sir Joseph Ward devoted so much of his speech at Marton last night to the Government's "toy navy." Even then, the effort seemed hardly worth while. The "toy navy" is practically dead. Mr James Allen's ridiculous proposal for policing the Pacific, protecting the trade routes, keeping Japan in check and assisting Australia and Canada in case of need with a single Bristol cruiser has been, laughed cut of tho Government's programme. It was never anything better than a rather paltry attempt to devise a scheme of defence different from anything the leader of the Opposition had suggested, and now it stands condemned by tho public as emphatically as it was condemned from the first by the naval experts. Mr Allen is making tho best of an extremely silly job by talking of air .Imperial Conference, where the whole question will be reconsidered, but tho best is a very sorry retreat from an impossible position. Of course, the Minister of Defence will continue to protest that he never intended- to commit the country to an expenditure of £1,500,000 a year, that ho has been misrepresented and misunderstood, and in our heart we shall fiud it easy to believe him. J* r#v

tho search for some scheme all his own, a scheme that would attract as much attention as did the gift of the Dreadnought, that got Mr Allen into trouble. He wanted to bo a " Great Imperialist," as other Ministers had been before him. It was party prejudice, not lack of patriotism, that proved his undoing. But thero is no need to dwell on his discomfiture. If he has good sense enough to take tho lesson to heart and to revive tho policy of his predecessor, which made for an invincible Imperial navy watching over the interests of the whole nation, the public will readily forgive the indiscretions of his ministerial youth and remember them only as vaulting ambitions to be avoided in future.