A DIGNIFIED REPLY.

Wanganui Herald, Volume XXXXV, Issue 13023, 14 March 1910, Page 4

A DIGNIFIED REPLY.

Most people, we imagine, will have been pleased to notice the new and more dignified note struck by the Hon. Mr McKenna, First Lord of the Admiralty, in the House of Commons when dealing w’ith the Naval Estimates. Asked whether he could not modify the enormous programme announced by him for the current year, in view of the fact that German activity in naval construction was apparently slackening, Mr McKenna told his questioner that the estimates were not based upon the assumption that any nation intended to be hostile, but on the needs of the Empire. The form and spirit of the reply will be commended in every part of the British world. It is the privilege of a man in Mr McKenna’s exalted position to speak for the nation. Fresh from the general election, in which he would have ample opportunity to gauge the feelings of the great mass of sane and reasonable men in regard to problems of defence and international rivalries, he felt he had his mandate, and, in his reply, he voiced the fearless majesty of a great people. The attitude is dignified and eminently correct. There should be no fuss and noisy declamation about any particular nation’s naval expansion. The facts should be noted and provision made as a matter of course, even if it involved the enormous increase of expenditure now projected by the British Government. Indeed, the mischief worked by the alarmists on the one hand, and the timid and conciliatory on the other, has already cost Britain and Germany enormous sums. The alarmists have stimulated rivalry in the building of warships, and the timid and conciliatory, by their silly and ineffectual appeals to Germany to moderate its constructive programme, convinced that country that England was unable to keep up the pace, and it was only necessary to spurt to get ahead of it. The new programme, however, with the addition of the colonial fleets, will convince any Power out for a race for naval superiority that the sacrifice involved in the attainment must be absolutely staggering. That it has aroused no stronger protest in England than the echoes which reach us seems to imply is a cheering augury _ for the maintenance of empire. For, it is a law of the general human economy as unalterable as those of the Modes and Persians, that when a nation wearies of the bfirdens of empire the sceptre falls from its hand, and it falls into the ruck of subject races.