the British navy, we are unable to see. In our judgment it points in exactly the opposite direction, as it puts into the hands of a rich nation, which has admittedly fallen into arrears, the power of making good her position by an immediate and wholesale (though the word is not ours) expenditure of money: the "slow and gradual" argument also assumes that your neighbours intend to sit still with their hands folded whilst you are "slowly" and "laboriously" plodding along with your piecemeal policy, – an assumption which is not justified by their recent course of action.
In proof of our assertion that under our present system of naval government the navy of the country is not maintained in accordance with national requirements, but rather in deference to party and electioneering interests, we would point to the fact that, at the beginning of this session, when, in consequence of the line of procedure taken out by a former colleague (Lord R. Churchill), the Government, thinking they must put in some claim for the character of economists, cut down the navy estimates by £900,000. And the First Lord, when making his statement to the House of Commons, said, in effect, – "What a good boy am I! and yet I will give you more for this reduced sum than my predecessors gave you for the larger sum." And then, a few months afterwards, when there had been a considerable agitation, possibly started, and certainly accentuated, in consequence of this £900,000 reduction – when popular feeling began to run high – and when Lord Wolseley, Sir E. Hamley, and others began to tell the country some plain but unpleasant truths about the army, the condition of which they considered most unsatisfactory, in consequence of the admission that the navy was not strong enough to perform its traditional duty of protecting the country from invasion, – then another member of the same Government – to wit, the Prime Minister – asserted, and claimed credit for the fact, that the increase of expenditure on the navy had been enormous during the last few years.
Under these circumstances, how is it possible to put in practice "The higher policy of defence"? or, in fact, any high and rational policy for the defence of this great, rich, and scattered empire, whose vast possessions, and comparative monopoly of the carrying trade of the ocean, are the envy of all her neighbours, and yet whose resources are so great, whose powers of producing ships and all maritime war material are so unrivalled, and whose points of vantage on the globe being so obvious, has it well within her power to make her position impregnable, and by so doing, to secure not only her own safety, but in all probability the peace of Europe. This was our contention at the beginning of this article. It may or may not be true that a powerful British navy is one of the surest guarantees of European peace, but it is quite certain that it is one of the surest guarantees for the safety of Great Britain. And this of itself is surely worthy of our consideration.
We have shown that it is admitted on all hands that the British navy is not strong enough; and we submit that we have given reasons why its increase should not be "a slow and gradual process," but that, on the contrary, it should be done with all despatch.
Finally, we would point to the present position of Great Britain in India, with reference to the
