NOTES AND COMMENTS.

New Zealand Herald, Volume XLIII, Issue 13354, 7 December 1906, Page 4

NOTES AND COMMENTS.

I EVE OF A GREAT STRUGGLE.

Ix an important'article in the Quarterly Review on "The Naval Situation." the writer, after giving statistics which show that we Lave obtained a notable lead in seels which embody, more or less completely, the main "lesion of the Ear Eastern war—the prime importance of the big gun— concludes: —'"The stern struggle for the maintenance of an invincible British fleet has not yet come, but it is assuredly coming. It is well that we should be forewarned and alert. The nation must understand that the reduction in expenditure on the .fleet cannot he continued. In cutting down waste, and by various other means effecting a saving of five millions in our outlay in two years, the Board of Admiralty have done a patriotic act ; but hopes that the navy estimates can be kept at about £30,000,000, at which they will stand next year, are ill-founded. The future depends not on the Government or the Board of Admiralty, but on the efforts of our neighbours. If they build, wo must do so also, and tip to the two-Power standard, with the necessary margin over. There is no possibility «f the Peace Conference having any influence on France or Germany or Russia in the direction of the limitation of armaments; ' and we must prepare for the grim and costly rivalry in naval power from 1910 onwards which will Income inevitable when the deliberations at The Hague have ended in idle wordsif no worse. We all desire peace; but it is a fool's paradise to imagine that this can l»e obtained by weakening the British Empire's only defensive' weapon; and no Government will (rifle with, this supremo interest without paying the penalty. Happily the day has gone when, without protest, a Government could starve the navy in order to save the petty and selfish and usually unpatriotic . exigencies of party. The British people know what an invincible fleet means to them. This awakening to the inwardness of British ria.val ascendancy, as a palpable sign of the unity of the Empire, is one of the new facts widen all political partie.* must take into account. The far-flung squadrons are the tentacles of Emnire, unseen, but everywhere exerting the traditional influence of the British people. For our own sake."*, as well as in the interests of the world's progress, the invincibility of the British fleet must continue to he assured: and politicians, however economically inclined, must, leant that this is the bedrock upon which all policy. Home, colonial, and foreign, must rest."

A DISGRACE TO EUROPE. On a recent Sunday., of all days in the week, there was witnessed as brutal a business at Tangier' as could only be equalled by ransacking the bloodstained archives of the Congo Stale. • The London Times' correspondent, whose usual trustworthiness is not open to "dispute, describes how a wretched Moor was tied up within 40yds of the French Legation, and a little farther from the' German Legation, to receive over 1000 lashes with a. knotted rope from relays of ruffians in Raisuli's employ. Happily, the victim soon "became unconscious, but the savagery of his torturers was so far from being appeased that the head of the gang stomped the poor creature's face into the stony surface of the ground. Then swiftly followed a second atrocity, in one respect even more revolting than the first display of savagery. This time if was a woman that was publicly scourged in the market-place, without apparently eliciting a single expression of sympathy or indignation from the spectators. It is not stated what her offence w*s; that alleged against, the masculine victim wjs his failure to obey a certain pronouncement of the Civil Court. But from the standpoint of European humanity, it is not of the Wat consequence whether the hapless couple had, or had not. broken the Moorish law. The whole Western world, with its boasted civilisation, is disgraced by its ta< it assumption that such horrors must occur until order is re-established in Morocco.