MISTRESS OF THE SEA.

Otago Witness, Issue 3384, 22 January 1919, Page 59

MISTRESS OF THE SEA.

WILL THE UNITED STATES DEPOSE

GREAT BRITAIN?

SUGGESTED UNION OF ENGLISHSPEAKING PEOPLE. In a thoughtful article by Mr Mark Si-llivan, editor of Collier's Weekly, on ''America's Part in the New World," the question is discussed -whether, as a result of the --war, and without any particular design in that direction, the United States has taken Great Britain's place in the' tun fiom which Germany sought to oust her. It is not the usual type of Yankee spread-eagleism, but seeks to analyse the position as the editor sees the facts, "and it is therefore of interest to others. Germany lusted for Britain's "place in the sun." One phrase commonly used to describe that place is "Mistress of the Seas." That phrase only partially de- * scribes it. With command of the seas goes world dominance. Mr Sullivan goes on to say : During 2248 years Tyre has had but seven true heirs. Tyre, in her time, was the inspiration of all commerce. Irrespective of nationality, all who trafficked by sea were called 'merchants of Tyre,' and all vessels '-of burden .'ships of Tyre." Dynasties lived by grace of Tyre's credit, and died at the calling of her loans. With the passing of Tyre, the position went to Carthage;, after Carthage to the Italian cities, Venice, Genoa, Florence, and Naples. Italy held her dominance for .700 years, until the Hanseatic League of Cities took the crown of commerce to the Baltic Sea. Then Portugal forced herself to the front. That was preceding the discovery of America bv Spain. With the aggressiveness of which that discovery was characteristic, Spain took the leadership away from Portugal. Spain held it 200 years, and lost it to Holland. Holland held: it for some generations and lost it to great Britain." And now either Great Britain is going to lose ~it to the United States or else Great Britain and the United States are going to divide it in a partnership. Which of these twos it shall be is one of the great problems of statesmanship and commerce that must be decided immediately. To understand this problem it is necessary to analyse this position of dominance and see what*it is composed of. Those who have not thought deeply into it assume that it consists merely in the possession of a great navy. But read this sentence from ' Admiral Mahan's "Influence of Sea Power Upon History" : "The necessity of a.navy . . . springs . . « from the existence of peaceful shipping, and disappears with it." .■;.■'.

The great navy, in other words, is merely an incident of world dominance. The true soui'ce of world, dominance 13 mercantile shipping and the commerce and finance which go with dominance in mercantile shipping. The navy is merely the pistol that defends the treasure. But if this position of world dominance, of mistress of the seas, does not consist merely in having the strongest navy, let ua see what it does consist in. It responds readily to analysis. World dominance consists of a combination of theso threo things : 1. Supremacy in finance. 2. 'Supremacy in mercantile shipping. 3. Supremacy in armed shipping. These three things go together. _ They cannot exist apart. Whatever nation has these, three is mistress of the seas, is dominant on the land, has that exalted "place in the sun" -which Germany coveted, fought for, and lost everything for. These, three things, In August, 1914, England had, and had had for more than 200 years. Mr Sullivan then proceeds to examine what the Avar did to each of these three elements of world dominance. Condensing somewhat, his reasons may be thus given: With the beginning of the war, and forced to it by the necessities of war, England began a series of financial transactions which within a year transferred her leadership to the United States. Before 1 the war we were deeply in debt to Great Britain, as, indeed, was practically every other nation in the world. She was our chief creditor, the chief lender of money to us, as she was to everybody else. It is not possible in a popular article to go more deeply into international finance. But one easily comprehended detail will illustrate the change that has occurred in the relations between England and ourselves: Before th 6 war we used to pay England about 300,000,000 dollars a year interest on the money im owed her; now England must pay us more than 150,000,000 dollars a year as interest on tho money she owes us. —America Financially Supreme.— It is not necessary here to go into the details of the transactions which brought about ' this momentous reversal in international relations—how England first bought huge quantities of goods from us and paid in cash ; how she borrowed great quantities of money from us on her national bonds; how she sold back to us, in order to get ready money, hundreds «f millions of American railroad bonds which had constituted the backbone of the private fortunes of many of her families; how later on she pledged still more of those American railroad bonds as collateral to raise money in America; how, at the last, after we entered the war ourselves, our Government loaned huge sums direct to the British Government. These transactions of England with America were not, of course, the whole of the things which took her financial supremacy from her and transferred it to u«. Neutral nations everywhere, like Norway and Spain, and the South American countries, and even some of England's colonies, had been accustomed, whenever they wanted to borrow money, to go to London; when that market was closed by the war, they began to come to New

York. The details of these transactions are too long to repeat here. It is enough to say that Great Britain was the greatest creditor nation in the world, and is so no longer; she was the greatest exporter of capital in the world; she is so no longer; she was the greatest money market in the world—that, too, came to the United States when the war began. —Outbuilding England.—

In shipping, before the war, Great Britain was clearly and unmistakably first among the nations. She had almost as many ships as all the rest of the world together. Of a world's total of about 50 million tons," England had over 20. These ships were the keystone of her commercial and financial arch. They were the corner stone of her greatness. Shipping was England's master business, the backbone? of all her resources. Shipping, together with the financial operations allied to shipping, like insurance, yielded England a revenue of nearly a billion dollars a year. Shipping was to England what our wheat crop is to us, or our cotton crop. Now let us see what the war did to England : In the first place, new building Of ships was practically stopped. She couldn't spare the men. She needed them for her army. The annual wastage through wear and tear mounted up on her at the rate of more than a million tons a year. Then the submarine got busy. At its worst, the submarine was sinking at the rate of nearly five million tons a year of England's ships. Three years at that rate would have left England where Germany designed to put her, without any ships or with so few that, after the war, Germany- could readily do what she set out to do: put more ships on the sea than England had. In fact, the German submarine has actually sunk about one-third of all the ships that England had. Germany saw clearly what was the chief Source of ' England's place in the sun. Germany Was using the submarine with high intelligence, not merely as a weapon of war, but as a weapon whose results would count most powerfully in peace time after the war. England saw the thing coming that spelled doom for her. She tried to resume her shipbuilding. She took her men back from the army. (And that depletion has much to do with the disasters in the field last spring.) But she could not build enough. In desperation she turned* to us. She asked us to build ships, to build ships as ships were never built before. And we did just that. We devised the fabricated ship. We devised the standardised ship. We reduced the time required for building a 3500-ton ship from nine months to less than two. Our achievements in ship-building have become a marvel in the shipping world. True, our total of actual ships launched is not yet anything like the residue that England still has. But we have created such a, plant, such a mechanism for shipbuilding as the world has never seen before,. And as soon as we have finished the ships already under way and contracted for, we shall have more ships than England. That will be about the middle of next year. And if we keep it up till the end of 1920 we shall have twice as many ships as England now has. --Allies or Trade Rivals?— To be sure, it may be assumed that England now, immediately, will begin to build mercantile ships as rapidly as possible. She has been building, during the war, nearly a million toils a year of warships. That force, quite naturally, will turn to merchant ships. But with the best she can do she cannot build ships "half as fast as we can if we choose to use our great new plant at its maximum. England's normal shipbuilding before tho war was les3 than 2,000,000 tons a year. During the war, when she was desperately hard pressed, the best she was able to accomplish was still less than 2,000,000 tons a year. The United States. with the new plants, can readily put out 6,000,000 tons a year. There can be no doubt that the end of the war leaves us with a- shipbuilding capacity more than twice as great as England's and as great as that of the rest of the -world combined, including England. —England's Navy Dominates.—

Turn now to the last of three elements that made up England's greatness—her navy. In tfyat one of the three elements England ends the war more nearly supreme than ever. What the war did to that was not to dimmish it, but to increase it greatly. The full story of that increase would not pass the censor yet. But that story, and especially the story of those unprecedented monsters, the socalled "hush ships," will have a most dramatic interest. England's navy began the Avar with 2,500,000 tons and 146,000 men; it ends the war with 6,500,000 tons of armed ships and 406,000 men. England concentrated on her navy. England's navy, as it stands to-day, is more than equal to any other two navies combined. In this one of the three elements of dominance, England is much more conspicuuously supreme than we are in either of the other two.

But this third element of dominance, which England still has, is of a very different character from the other two-thirds that we have or are in process of acquiring. For there is this important fact to get in your mind: Our two elements, finance and shipping, are revenue producers —a navy is a revenue eater. Admiral Mahan only went so far as to say that no nation wants a dominating navy, or is likely to keep one, unless it has dominance in ships and commerce- I would say further, certainly as to England and the conditions of the present day, that no nation can keep a dominant navy unless it also has ships and finance. A navy exists only for the purpose of protecting the other two. And so, of the three things which compose dominance of the world, one, naval supremacy, still remains with England. Another, financial supremacy, has passed definitely away from England to the United States. The third, mercantile shipping supremacy, is midway between the two nations, If we stop shipbuilding

with the mere winding up of our present programme, we shall have about as many ships as England. But if we decide to go on with our ship-building, we shall have the mercantile . supremacy which Great Ui'itain has had for many generations. \ —These Three Together.— To sum up, Great Britain has the navy. We have the money. The ships just now are divided between Great Britain and us. If the war had gone on our shipping supremacy would have been certain; in all probability the shipping supremacy is going to be ours, anyway. , These three things belong together. To-. gether they compose the thing which makes worlds dominance. For them to remain separated is unnatural and perhaps impossible. That being so, what is the answer? Money -and mercantile shipping can build a navy and support it, but a navy can't build anything or maintain anything. As a matter of fact. Great Britain's case in this respect has little hope in it. Only by our voluntary abnegation, by our deliberate refusel of the prize which fate offers us, can England restore herself to her old position. Her financial supremacy is gone, and afnation cannot become rich in a day or a year or a -generation, any more than an individual can. We are richer than Great Britain only because Great Britain was more than four years in the war, and we only a year and a-half. Great Britain, with France, bore the brunt, while we came in merely for the finishing blow. If senior partnership in an enterprise were determined by resources expended, England and France would be the senior partners among the Allies. But as the world goes, senior partnership in an enterprise is determined by resources not yet expended. And it is in that respect, that America is easily senior. We have lost only about one dead to England's 75 and France's 100. We have expended less than one dollar to England's two. But if we are troubled. by these reflections, let us remember this: our hands are clean of envy. The position we are in came without intrigue, or any sort of intention. It is merely one of the accidents of the way the war worked out.

—Uncle Sam, John Bull, Partners?— But there is a course, which is not generous or emotional, but has elements of logic. And while no one has~ stated it formally, it is easy to recognise a groping towards it in the minds of many public men and leaders of thought.

We can become Great Britain's partner. I state the proposal merely for the purpose of stating; it, and not necessarily to advocate it. To get it out on paper will crystallise discussion. For I know from conversations Avith English statesmen that, vaguely, some such notion, not yet clear in details even to themselves, is in the back of many men's minds. It is the fcasis for the many suggestions of an Eng-lish-speaking union, or an' Anglo-Saxon union. It is the material and commercial basis of the proposed League of Nations. If the thing is to be confined to just Great Britain and her colonies and the United States, it is what men mean when they talk of an English-speaking union. If a larger group is to be taken in, it is the League of Nations. So far all the talk of a league of nations has been in the world of abstraction and idealism. What is here set down about ships and money and battleships is the bones of it.