OCR Text |
Show days she depended upon berVooden walls, now she depends upon her walls of steel and her twelve-inch twelve-inch guns. . M WhKe it is shameful that our Government has neglected so long to make Pearl Harbor a real naval station, the thing to do is to proceed to make it so, and have it so fixed , that if Japan, or any other power should come to take it they would not succeed, suc-ceed, anti would not get the coal, and. would have to return home. It would be a protection to San Francisco and to all the-West coast of our country- The Argonaut says that as soon as a battleship is built on the Pacific it is sent around to the other side to act as an escort to the President on his junketing jun-keting trips, which is a weak thing to say, because, while the President has made two trips on a warship, it has not cost the Government anything extra, and it has involved no weakening of the navy. At the same time we believe, as does the Argonaut, that the West coast needs more battleships than the East, and that the relative number of ships in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans should be governed by the respective re-spective size of the two oceans. Our country is ready now to meet any power or combination of European powers; at the same time there is no occasion for such extensive preparation, because there is no powervof Europe, nor any combination com-bination of powers that would like to undertake a war with the United States; but there is a power across the Pacific which is just now afflicted badly with the disease called the "swelled head. it is ambitious, too, to control the commerce of the Pacific; Pa-cific; it has at least one ship superior to any in the American navy, and moreover it is a very treacherous treacher-ous race and it might make great trouble on all the West coast, and our thought would be not to deplore de-plore the ownership of the Hawaiian islands, but to so equip a naval station there with fortifications and ships, that in the event of a sudden war the first brunt of it would come there instead of off San Francisco Fran-cisco harbor. ' HAWAII AS A NAVAL STATION. The Argonaut of San Francisco jeers over the , fact that while eight or nine years ago the press i favored the attainment of Hawaii, that it might be i a naval base, a rendezvous for warships and a coal-'ing coal-'ing station; the Government has not fortified the I islands, does not keep a squadron there, and if it has j a coal station, it asks what would happen if Japan, 'in contemplating war. should do as she did with i Russia before declaring war go and take the islands -1 and the coal! Our own thought is that Pearl Harbor ought to i be improved and made a great naval station. Our 'further idea is that there should be fighting ships ! enough kept there to defend it. England has about done away with her land : fortifications, and England is an island. In the old - A |