VOLUME XLIV

T

HE things so worthily done at the Washington Conference, things so infinitely worth doing and so auspicious of hope to the peace of the world, have now been ratified in treaty form by the Senate of the United States. These treaties are landmarks of progress toward a goal upon which the most profoundly seated aspirations of the American heart are set. However short they fall of rearing the full structure of the house of hope which is visioned by men of good-will, that palace of permanent peace insured by the aggregated assent of all nations, they are yet workmanlike blocks fixed in the walls of that edifice, and are laid in the spirit of the Anglo-Saxon tradition of governmental growth upward which Tennyson described as a slow and steady progress from precedent to precedent.

Being thus committed to the method of slow and proportioned growth, having chosen this method in preference to the League of Nations idea of achieving the result by a single creation of a complete if imperfect structure to be later modified by experience, there is all the more reason to remember that the method of slow growth requires that the other elements of the structure must be proportioned to the blocks we have set in the building.

If we had entered the League of Nations, we should have been committed, equally with all the world, to a reduction of armies and navies to forces so small that they would have amounted practically to little more than police forces. Such a reduction, being universal, would have been perfectly safe for us to undertake.

NUMBER I

But we did not enter the League of Nations. Instead, we entered into a Four-Power Agreement regarding armaments. This agreement is very limited in its scope. It does not bind any Power to limit its army in any manner. It does not bind any Power to limit the number of its submarines, or its cruisers, or its destroyers, or its airplanes. Its only effective limitation upon armament is upon the tonnage of battleships and battle cruisers. The best naval opinion is that these ships are defenseless against attack by airplanes.

The Four-Power treaty was agreed upon by the leaders of the governments concerned, aided by the advice of experts; and their agreement upon the 5-5-3 ratio was based upon the fullest study of a relationship that would least invite one Power to be tempted to aggression by having undue naval strength, and that would leave each Power exactly its necessary defensive strength. It is, therefore, folly for America to fall below its allotted amount of naval armament. And it is folly twice over to lower the efficiency of the fleet we are allowed to have. To maintain the American fleet at full efficiency, and to maintain an American Army which will meet the approval of Generals Pershing and Harbord (both of them convinced advocates of reduced armaments, but intelligent in their convictions), are essential to American safety. More than that, they are essential to the success of the ideals of the Washington Conference itself. Those ideals are based upon an orderly and proportioned plan of gradual reduction of armaments. The words "gradual" and "proportioned" are as essential to success as the word "reduction."