The Star. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1913. A FEW FACTS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 10927, 17 November 1913, Page 4

The Star. MONDAY, NOVEMBER 17, 1913. A FEW FACTS.

A Mr Higgs arose- in the Now South Wales House of Representatives tho other day to protest against the increased cost of Australian naval expenditure. Certain people, he said, take the view that the awakening of China is fraught with danger to Australia, and that we are also in danger from Japan. I believe, however, that wo have no reason to anticipate danger from Japan. In the first place that country, I read, is overburdened with debt. Authorities tell us that an attacking force must he five times as strong as a defending force. That was about the position in the case of the South African War. The Tho Boer forces consisted of about 50,000 soldiers, and Great Britain had to send out 250,000 to defeat them. That war cost the Old Country £211,000,000. Is Japan in a position to send an attacking force force of 250,000 men to Australia, or to find £211,000,000 to provide for the cost of an Australian invasion ?

This led the "Bulletin" to take a hand in the controversy and to utter the following remarks:— The first element in this consoling theory is that Japan is overwhelmed with debt, therefore it can't attack Australia, Yet Japan owes only £o per inhabitant, and though it is a poor oountrw it is steadily growing richer. Also tliere are ways of getting out of debt in a great emergency. Austria, after it had carried tho heat and burden of the Napoleonic wars, went insolvent twice, and the final clean-up was at the rate of about 2d in the £. Russia solemnly filed its schedule in the 'forties of last century. Some of the State Legislatures of tho United States simply told their creditors they would see them hanged first, and paid nothing at all. The creditors are still hanged first. Spain repudiated at least two debts bodily, and compounded on one or two more, and once it didn't pay the composition. And there are many other examples, including that of Italy, which once levied so much income-tax on its creditors' dividends that the dividends fell very considerably. A country with a sufficiently good army and navy and a sufficiently bad conscience can always get out of debt if the circumstances call for a big effort. There isn't the slightest reason to suspect that Japan or any other existing Great Power would contemplate these drastic old methods, still it isn't well to rely too much on a nation's .debt (a debt of £5 per head) as a guarantee of its peacefulness. To get down from the wholesale to the retail, the late Henry Parkes was almost always in debt, but his peacefulness was an unknown quantity. # # * » # Then, again, there are States which go to war most cheerfully when they are most dead broke. • When the original Napoleon first came to the front he had charge of a force that was almost naked and shoeless, ill-fed, illaraed, wholly unpaid, and backed by a Government which had practically given up printing paper money for want of funds with which to buy the paper and the ink. For many years he not only made war pay for itself, hut made it show huge profits. He not only stole the land and money of the conquered States, but -he embezzled their pictures, statues and furniture. The Mahratta Confederacy in its great days always expected its generals to make conquest pay, and also to declare a dividend when they came home. It struck the beginnings of ruin when it sacked its greatest general for failing to declare the usual dividend, and put the Chancellor of the Exchequer in his place. If it hadn't carried the principle of cheap war to an extreme it might be .a flourishing State to-day. It is a common saying that Turkey's chronic impecuniosity never prevented it going out and killing somebody. When it was poorest it had the greatest desire to feel in the pockets of the dead for any loose assets. Japan is a country which conducts war on a fairly inexpensive princicrjles. It eats and drinks cheaply, builds its ships cheaply, and pays amazingly low wages. It has 230,000 men always under arms, and they could probably live as easily in Sydney as in Tokio. It has a great array of ships, and they could probably get coal at Newcastle for a lower figure than at Kobe. There are certainly difficulties in campaigning with little money, but the thing has been done, and it may happen again. *** » * * The Boer war, on which Higgs, M.H.R., bases his theory that an attacking force must bo five times as strong as a defending one, is a tired and threadbare circumstance nowadays. Because Australia sent a few contingents to the Boer scrap, certain politicians have a habit of regarding it as the whole history, narrative and embodiment of war—and it isn't. Who the " authorities" may bo who support his amazing view Higgs doesn't say, but it would be interesting to know their names. Assuredly in the successive conquests of England by Romans, Saxons, Danes and Normans the invading force was the smaller. The British conquered India and Burma with mere handfuls. Tho Saracens biult their empire against immense odds. The Japanese weren't anything dimly resembling five to one when they seized Korea, nor were the Germans in their invasion of France in 1870. The "authorities" from whom Higgs thinks he got his comforting information appear a dubious lot, and on a rough estimate three-fourths of the evidence of history is against them. Certainly in a rare case like that of the African annoyance, when the assailant is a tortoise and the defendant is an ostrich for speed, and a very hardfighting bird at that; when there are no bloated coastal cities to defend, and one 6louch-hatted rider can defy all the fleets on all tho seas; and the wealth of the country is so widely diffused that there is no one supremely vulnerable spot—in such a case it may require even a great deal more, than five-fold odds to effect a conquest. But the instance is one in a thousand.