LONDON, April 2. THE GERMAN DANGER

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XLII, Issue 20, 19 May 1909, Page 56

LONDON, April 2. THE GERMAN DANGER

What Conservatives call the national peril aud what Liberals call the navy scare continues to dominate the public mind to an exteut without parallel since the early days of the Boer war. All the defects of the party system l»e--come glaringly apparent at such a time as this. While one set of papers aud politicians is telling the public that the very life of the Empire is imperilled, another set is just as busily engaged in pooh-poohing the whole affair. If you are a Conservative you believe the facts and figures of the one set: if you are a Liberal, you swear l»y the other set; and if you are neither, you proliably give the whole thing up in despair as a hopeless tangle of contradictions, distortions, rumours, recriminations and enigmas beyond the power of any private individual to unravel. But ont of the din and turmoil of party strife emerge certain facts of the gravest import. The first is that the evolution of the Dreadnought type of battleship has rendered other classes of warship ont of date. Henceforth the strength of rival navies will lie measured in Dreadnoughts. Following on this is the second fact, referred to by Sir Edward Grev in the naval debate in the House last Monday in these words:— “A new situation is created by the German programme. When it is completed. Germany, a great country close to our own shores, will have a fleet of thirty-three * Dreadnoughts,’ and that fleet will lie the most powerful which the world has ever yet seen. “It imposes on us the necessity of relmilding the whole of onr fleet. That is the situation.” The Foreign .Secretary's outline of the situation is in itself sufficient to justify all the stir that has been made about the British navy. Sir Edward Grey put the case even more plainly. ‘’Surely.” he said, ’’it is obvious that the whole of Europe is in the presence of a great danger.” The danger for England lies in the ambitions of the German ruling class, and also in the habitual tendency of the English people to underrate their opponents. It is difficult to make the English realise that Germany means business, and that she is not only ambitions I>ut formidable. She has a population of 70 millions, and every man has been trained to the use of arms. She has a great and growing trade, -and a wonderful national capacity and training for organisation. She is the greatest military Power in Europe, and she is building a fleet which is to be “the most powerful which the world has ever yet seen.” M'hy should we doubt that Germany intends to lie the predominant European Power? But there are plenty of Englishmen who pooh-pooh the notion, and trust blindly to their navy to pull them through somehow without any special effort or sacrifice on their part. Even now that Germany has stolen a inarch on the British navy by secretly accelerating her programme and greatly increasing her eapactiy to build, it is difficult to convince a good many Englishmen that the whole affair is not a dark design on tlie part of the Tariff Reformers in this country! The strongest criticism of the present state of unpreparedness in England conies from a Socialist leader, Mr Robert Blatchford. “We are disunited,” he says in this week’s “Clarion”: “we are untrained; we are overconfident; we are strongly averse to war; we are still more strongly attached to our own ease and freedom. MV do not want to fight, we do not want to pay. we do not want to worry. We are full of words, and we have not learnt that words are not deeds and that figures are not facts.” In marked contrast we have the Labour Party deprecating the naval crisis as “a panic engineered here, for political purposes,” and objecting to the “wave of impulse” which has led to the munificent offers of colonial aid. With extraordinary wrongheadedness, they see in these offers a sort of insult to the strength of the Mother Country. They know of no danger across the German Ocean, because they refuse to look for it. If England is to be lulled into a

fancied security by words, she is likely to have a rude awakening later oa. Fortunately there are not wauling signs that the country is awakening to a sense of the situation's needs. If the “wave of impulse” leads to a deeper sense of individual responsibility for national defence, it will mark a new epoch in the uation’s history.