July 16.
Every day brings from some new quarter a welcome for President Hafding's invitation to the Powers to confer about Far Eastern problems and the burden of armaments. For the first time effective League of Nations is to meet, not for the discussion of some vague programme of general desirabilities, at a cost of one million sterling annually, but for two definite undertakings the zation of which lies in their own hands. he invitation to this meeting comes from the President of the United States, seated in his own capital and with the full. approval of the Government which had planned the greatest programme of naval construction known to history. Not only-is America thus brought again into active participation in the field of world polities from which she had withdrawn, but she has taken the lead without which no device for the limitation of armaments would have possessed any value, but which no other Government could, without impertinence, suggest toher. We do not yet clearly understand why America planned this vast navy. But if she meant to have it, it was plainly a matter for her own decision, about which only informal representations could be made by others.- Tt would be absurd to pretend that her naval plans were not regarded with sad misgiving abroad. It was not a question of whether they were aimed. at this Power or at that, but that after the world had endured four years of devastating war to crush militarism in the Old World, it seemed that a possible moment. President Harding's proposal, according to the first telegram, was for a disarmament conference to be preceded by conversations about Far Eastern and Pacific problems. In other words the President's idea would seem to have been that an understanding as regards the Far East and a ''clean slate' policy in that direction should be the precursor to a disarmament conference—which indeed—for many reasons would be the natural order of events. This also seems plainly to have been Mr. Lloyd George's conception of things, judging by his speech in the House of Commons on July 11, in_which he described how the Dominion Premiers had passed quickly from consideration of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance to the whole question of Far Eastern and Pacific policy and the necessity of including America and China in the discussion. Now, however, from the telegrams of the past day or two the Far East seems to be taking second place to the question of disarmament. In one sense, no doubt, it does, inasmuch as more nations are directly-concerned in it than in the Far East: But as the latter region contains some of the most inflammable material in the world to-day, we may earnestly hope that it will be kept in the forefront of the deliberations at Washington. It will be far easier for the nations to agree about disarmament if they have first settled their differences in the Pacific, than rice versa. In this connexion the news from Tokio, that Japan will readily join in a disarmament conference but must first see the agenda of any discussion of Far Eastern questions before partaking in it, cannot but awake misgivings. We see here, again, the evidence of two cur-
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.