MISTS OF IDEALISM

Nelson Evening Mail, Volume LXIV, 5 December 1929, Page 8

MISTS OF IDEALISM

AND NAVAL NECESSITIES FACING THE TRUTH In the London "Morning Post" of 22nd October appeared the following impressive leading article:— Tin; Nelson Column, despite the wreaths in honour of Trafalgar Day> is rather obscured nt the moment by thi) mists of idealism. We are even being told that we can do without a Navy, and depend upon treaties for our safety, and that we can safely surrender the right to use our fleet with the old rigours of war, if we ever should bo compelled to fight, that eventuality being so remote as to be negligible. Now, these sentiments are very useful to politicians who desire —to put it in plain language—to bribe the electorate with the money now spent on the Navy; but if 'there is anything in history—if what has happened before may happen again—they might be fatal to the nation. Lord Lloyd, at the Navy League dinner last night, reminded his hearers of the stalwart fight made by Lord Nelson against such ''monstrous propositions" as are now fashionable. It may be said that what he took to be the rights of the belligerent are now out of date, as we are all to be neutral for evermore. Wo hope it may be so; but the same retort was doubtless made to Nelson in 1801; it nearly prevailed in the Declaration of London more than a hundred years later, yet Mr Asquith was fain to declare, on the Ist of March, 1915, that "under existing conditions there is no form of economic pressure to which we do not consider ourselves entitled to resort."

We are too apt to forget that Ave owe nothing less than our lives to the Loyal Navy, and that, as these islands can no longer feed themselves, we might, but for the benevolent shadow of its protection, be starved into famine and headlong surrender. And, if such things are forgotten in England, where the circumambient waves whisper a warning eternally in the ears of those who listen, it is also apt to be forgotten in the more Continental parts of the British Empire. A debate (at Montreal) on "Canada and the Problem of Naval Disarmament" is reported in the current number of tho Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, and several speeches rather suggest an entanglement in that "network of juridical niceties" which Mr Asquith was fain to cut as the only means to safety. Mr Mackenzie King speaks with pride of the Rush-Bagot Treaty, under which Canada and the United States have each maintained for a century of unbroken peace only four gunboats each in the Great Lake's. But that, of course, is not the whole story. Canada, herself, owes both her existence and her liberties, in the first place, to the Royal Navy, and then, and continuously, to that balance of penver which maintains the British Empire in the New World as in the Old. Let that balance be destroyed, and how long, despite all pacts and treaties, would any part of that Empire rest secure? Canada is growing mightily not only in industry and agriculture but in commerce: her ships are even now bringing to her people the fruits, the sugar, and other tropical commodities of the West Indies. For the protection of that traffic her naval provision of two destroyers is almost ludicrously inadequate. Her vast grain trade, her sea carriage, east, west and south, these owe their security to the existence of the Royal Navy, under whose benignant shade Canada has grown and prospered mightily. These things are taken so much as a matter of course as to be ignored in the outlook, of most of the Dominions, yet it rer mains true that the trade of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, have no other security than the fleet whieb they seldom see but of which the very existence is a perpetual restraint to any potential enemy. The ideal of peace in an unarmed world is not served by ignoring truth.