Читать книгу Essays in Liberalism - Various - Страница 20

Soon after that came the Washington Conference—a great landmark in the history of this problem. For reasons I need not go into in detail, the naval problem is very much easier than the military or air problem. You have as the nucleus of naval forces something quite definite and precise—the battleship—and it also happens that that particular unit is extremely costly, and takes a long time to build, and no man has yet ever succeeded in concealing the existence of a battleship. There you had three important points—a large and important unit in the possession of everybody concerned, very costly, so that by reducing it you make great reductions in expenditure. There was no possibility of avoiding an agreement about the construction of battleships, and it is to these facts mainly that the happy results of the Washington Conference were due.

But for the furtherance of the problem the point is this. The Washington Conference definitely established the principle of reduction of armaments on a great ratio. The ratio for battleships between Great Britain, the United States, Japan, France, and Italy, was settled as to 5, 5, 3, and 1.75. They all agreed on a definite ratio. All agreed to scrap a certain number of ships, to bring their tonnage down to a certain figure, and by doing that relatively they were left in the same position as before, with this advantage—that they at once obtained an enormous reduction in expenditure on armaments.

That opened up a new line of approach for the attack on this problem from the military and air standpoint. And the next development took place in February this year at the meeting of the Temporary Mixed Commission on armaments, when the Esher proposals were presented. There has been a great deal of talk about the Esher proposals, and I am glad of it, because the one thing wanted in this question is public interest. The Esher proposals were an endeavour to apply to land armaments this principle of reduction on a great ratio. And the line taken was this. It was necessary to find some unit in land armaments which corresponded with the battleships, and the unit selected by Lord Esher was the 300,000 regular soldiers of the peace armies in France, England, and Spain. It was selected because it happened to be the number to which the Austrian army was reduced by treaty, and with that unit he proposed a ratio for the armies of Europe, which would leave everybody relatively in much the same position as before, but would obtain an immediate reduction in numbers of standing armies and a great reduction of expenditure.

This proposal was subjected to a great deal of criticism, and I am sorry to say nine-tenths of the criticism appears to emanate from persons who have never read the proposal at all. It is a proposal which lends itself to a great deal of criticism, and the most effective criticism which could have been applied at the time it was presented was that it put the cart before the horse, and approached the problem from the wrong direction, for, as Lord Robert Cecil has said here this morning, what nations require is security. Some of them have clear ideas as to the way of obtaining it, but they all want it, and before you can expect people to reduce their armaments, which are, after all, maintained mainly for the purpose of providing security, you must give them something that will take the place of armaments.