FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

Colonist, Volume LV, Issue 13736, 30 May 1913, Page 8

FOOD FOR THOUGHT.

The "New Zealand Dairyman" contains an excellent article entitled "Fifty Years and One Battleship." The main purpose of tho writer, who chocs carefully into detail, is to shon how nipid!y this oversea trade is growing and whrt a boon—:::id a remarkibly cheap boon (notes t'i? "Now Zealand Times") is and has been the protection of our commerce by the British navy. In fifty years New Zealand's total seaborne trade, exports and imports .'iirgregated in value more than £770,000.000. . "That> shows us," says the "Dairyman," "the enormous number of millions wo may expect in the future, all of which will want the same safeguarding that their predecessors have had. Now, orr tho seven hundred and seventy iniTions, what a bagatelle is the couple of millions wo have paid, or are paying, for the big battleship! The contemplation of the future proves to us that this is but a beginning. It is another "way of saying that the problem of Imperial defence is growing into the region cf practical settlement. It is a question from which all party strife should be rigidly excluded. All tho men of tho Dominion should pull together in getting tho solution of the problem. Our future depends entirely upon our owii efforts. Whether are wo to have a Dominion Imperial solution or an Asiatic subjection solution? Every man worth his salt in the Dominion knows which answer he is ready to o;ive. In that case every man nrust be ready. to approve the steps to be itaken to that end. both financial'and .personal. This is the reminder of the big battleship to the quarter million people who visited her. Let it never bo forgotten."