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It has been tacitly abandoned. What must be the effect of the Little Navy policy upon the prestige of a nation. whose existence and independence are due to sea power and sea power alone, who has no Army to speak of? How different the situation of the challenger. Germany is a mighty, compact, continental Power, surrounded by military nations, without any colonies worth keeping, rendered invulnerable by a mighty Army which plays the same rôle in the German Empire as the British Navy has played in the British Empire. Englishmen have never regarded the German Army with jealousy or suspicion, but we are compelled to regard the growth of the German Navy, which can only be intended, and is avowedly intended, for aggressive purposes, with profound suspicion, which is aggravated by the attitude of our own Government, which flatly refuses to make serious counter-preparations and misleads the people upon the facts staring us in the face. A day after the comment of the Novoe Vremya should have opened the eyes of the blindest to our home-made peril, because the British Government is immeasurably more dangerous to Great Britain than the German Government, we were afflicted by the speech of an ordinary Cabinet Minister, of the type-neither better nor worse that ordinary Cabinet Ministers habitually deliver upon National Defence. The statesman, or rather, politician, in question is Mr. Herbert Samuel, Postmaster-General, and, for aught we know, a very decent Postmaster-General, being fully qualified to supervise the accurate and punctual distribution of our letters. He made no reference to the remarkable transaction whereby four super-"Dreadnoughts will replace four pre-" Dreadnoughts" in the German navy. Like the rest of his colleagues, headed by the Prime Minister, he whimpered over the rapid increase of foreign navies, "which compelled this country, against its will, to spend each year a larger and larger proportion of national treasure in providing armaments against the risk of war."

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MESSRS. SAMUEL and Co. can never escape the pounds, shillings and pence aspect, which is the least important aspect, of national security, nor can they rid themselves of the delusion that safety can be bought by casha delusion which we may say pervades Front Benches generally.

Samuelism

He whined for the limitation of armaments, a habit which is probably more responsible for the gigantic growth of the German Fleet than anything else, except the reduction of British Naval estimates in the last years of the late Unionist Government and in the earlier years of the present Government. Mr. Samuel then attacked the National Service League for its wickedness in advocating compulsory military service for the whole male population. This is Samuelism as reported in the Times (August 23), and we are grateful to our contemporary for recording such drivel, as it gives us the measure of the men who are running the country on the rocks: "That men should go through a course of drill might be of some physical value, but those physical advantages could be better secured by the physical training of boys and girls in the schools, for in the first place that would affect both sexes [our italics], and in the second place the physical training would be given at an age when it would be more effective for its purpose." This gem was followed by an illuminating observation, showing as it does that the ruck of the Cabinet remain in the kindergarten: "Compulsory military service was unnecessary because, living on these islands, so long as we maintained a Navy of overwhelming strength, we ran no risk of invasion. If there were some small raid or attack from foreign shores we had within these isles hundreds of thousands of men already voluntarily trained to arms, who would be amply sufficient to repel any attack." The speaker concluded by exhorting the working classes to "realise the dangers and the harmfulness of that most unnecessary agitation, and help to nip it in the bud before it grew too strong."

"Over

whelming "

FOR a Member of the Cabinet which has brought the British Navy to its present position, vis-a-vis Germany, to describe our supremacy (especially in the face of such opinions as we have quoted from the Novoe Vremya, which merely expresses the views of all intelligent students of public affairs) as "overwhelming," is surely, in the classic phrase of Lord Randolph Churchill, "a wilful diffusion of political error with regard to a matter of fact." Any man with a spark of patriotism in his composition would utilise the gathering crisis to interest our working classes in the safety of the State. Any genuine democrat and sincere Liberal

would exhort them to make sacrifices in person as well as by purse in order to assure the future of Western Liberalism, which depends upon our keeping in the front rank of Great Powers. Such speeches at such moments compel us to ask whether the Samuels care if England comes to grief? "What am I to Hecuba or Hecuba to me?" He complacently contemplates the landing of small raids with which our hundreds of thousands of highly trained volunteers could cope. But if small raids can land, why not large raids? And where are these armies of trained men? We doubt whether at this moment there are five and twenty thousand troops in this country ready to take the field, and recent experience has shown, if anything can show those who won't see, that the Territorial force is not a home defence force, being totally unfitted to meet the only troops it is ever likely to be called upon to face. This is not the fault of the Territorials but of the politicians, who conceal the actual facts from the public because the truth would involve disagreeable consequences. We need say nothing of Mr. Samuel's sneers at the National Service League, whose propaganda the Samuelites are unwittingly promoting by teaching the people that Ministers are indifferent as to the fate of the country, thus forcing them to take the matter into their own hands.

We have never been alarmed by the German danger, but we are seriously alarmed by the British danger. The successive alarums and excursions of the Wilhelmstrasse are The British Danger so transparent that they would not impose on any intelligent infant, but they habitually impose on British Ministers because the latter desire to be deceived. Therein lies the British danger. Were there any serious sense of patriotism or duty in the Cabinet we could afford to snap our fingers at the whole posse comitatus of pan-German Leagues, Navy Leagues, Zeppelin Leagues, chauvinistic professors and parsons, and the semi-official apparatus of Berlin and Potsdam. We should organise our Navy for war. We should lay down two keels to one. We should adopt compulsory service. We see, however, from such an utterance as that of Mr. Samuel, upon which we lay stress because it is so thoroughly typical of the professional Party politician, that those who are primarily respon

sible for the safety of the State, are moving about in worlds unrealised, and have not begun to have the ghost of a glimmering of the formidable problem confronting them. Such a speech is hall-marked "Front Bench." There is first the hackneyed and abject appeal to other nations to stop building ships, which can only have the opposite effect to that intended; secondly, the cheap swagger about our "overwhelming" Navy, at the moment our margin of superiority over one Power is passing; thirdly, the dismissal of invasion as a contingency unworthy of serious attention (vide Mr. Balfour's fateful and fatal speech in May 1905); fourthly and finally, the pitiful jibe at National Service and the exhortation to the working classes to nip it in the bud as something sinister and villainous, though from time immemorial the defence of the State has been regarded as the first duty of all able-bodied male citizens-and how can men defend their country without being trained, and why should the majority cast upon the minority a duty devolving upon all. The British danger looms large. On one side of the North Sea we find a Government composed of serious men instead of windy mountebanks, doing all that mortal men can do to arouse and sustain the patriotism of a great nation in arms, and encouraging them to make ever-increasing sacrifices for the honour and greatness of the Fatherland. On the other side we have a Government-if that can be called a Government which has no notion of governing-of political adventurers, pettifogging attorneys, and meticulous time-servers, all "on the make" at the expense of their country, devoting their talents to the quest of votes, few of whom have a soul above the last division or the next by-election.

INSTEAD of trying to educate and elevate our people to some conception of their great and growing responsibilities, and to an

The Press and Seapower

appreciation of the Imperial mission they have inherited and can't shake off without eternal disgrace, and with which, be it not forgotten, the welfare of the inhabitants of these islands is indissolubly bound up, our politicians prefer to drag the people down to their own low level in order the more easily to rob them of their vote. Cabinet Ministers flood the country with Niagaras

of falsehood on every great national issue, the flood being swollen by the streams and rivulets that issue from every Ministerial printing-press. You may search these columns of spoken and written balderdash in vain for any shadow of a suggestion that, in return for the services due from the State to its citizens, corresponding obligations are due from the citizens to the State. The single political duty urged upon the nation by the Ministry of all the talents, backed by the Party of all the virtues, is to swallow the biggest falsehood and to applaud the loudest liar. When the voter has delivered his vote no further interest is taken in him until another opportunity arises for deception and fraud. That our "statesmen" so-called are themselves demoralised by their pitiful trade is clear to all serious onlookers. How far have they succeeded in demoralising the nation? How far have they undermined British character to the point of making it incapable of such great efforts as have in the past saved the country, and which will assuredly be needed in the near future unless we are to be blotted out from the map of nations? The greater danger lies on this side of the North Sea. After a few more years of the present gang, we shall be unable to put up a decent fight against Germany. If we have the Government we deserve we are indeed in a bad way. The pressing problem is, what can be done? Like the Chinese mandarins, complained of by Lord Elgin, Ministers yield nothing to reason, but surrender everything to fear-fear of the public in its capacity as voters. So it is to the public that we must appeal. National Defence must be frankly discussed and the truth laid before the country. Political partisans are in a difficulty in undertaking this task, because people who live in glass houses can't afford to throw stones. British Governments have always had to be coerced into maintaining British sea-power by outside pressure. The creation of our magnificent modern Fleet, which gave us security during nearly twenty critical years, was the handiwork of a few devoted journalists, inspired by Captain Mahan and assisted by gallant sailors, such as Lord Charles Beresford, prepared to make professional sacrifices. That mighty instrument of peace has been let down of late years because, instead of placing the interests of the Navy, which are those of the nation, above all personal considerations, leading journals have become departmental echoes. They were misled into

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