OCR Text |
Show THE QUESTION OF DISARMAMENT. It has now been decided that the subject of disarmament dis-armament will be one of the chief questions discussed dis-cussed at The Hague conference, i We sincerely hope that something will come of it, yet we have not much faith. The only nation that we can think of among the great powers which will look upon that matter favorably, it seems to us, is Great Britain. Not that Great Britain likes peace any better than the rest,' but her navy is so overwhelmingly over-whelmingly superior to any other two powers that she can afford to assume a benevolent position and to manifest a pronounced desire for universal peace and the doing away of war preparati6ns. ' , " "We do not think Germany will favor it. "We do I not think the Russian delegates will be,in favor of it, and if Japan is represented we shall expect to see her delegates apparently most anxious for a consummation consum-mation of the plan, but will favor putting it off for another year; because Japan has three or four invincible in-vincible warships in course of construction. It looked four or five years ago as though an ar-1 ar-1 t rangement would soon be reached by which the nations, na-tions, would agree to only keep their naval arma-f arma-f ment as they, were then, but since then the Russian i navy has been wiped out. Since then Japan has de-, de-, veloped into a great power, and since then Great Britain has been rushing her navy yards until the I real strength of her warships and guns is probably ' equal to any three powers of the earth. That being the case, we rather suspect that while there may be a great deal of discussion, there will not be any real i steps taken to reduce or even to stay the world's ) fighting strength. |