"Disantamer."—By Profersor P._ J, ker, (The Hogarth Press, Professor Baker was for some time a member of the Secretariat Geneva, and for longer assistant of Lord Cecil (writes Maj-Gen. Sir Frederick Maurice in the Morning Post"). Having, there. fore, been in close touch with all the efforts which have been made at Geneva and elsewhere to find some common ground upon which, an international agreement car: built up, he is able to give such a history of the que: would be difficult to improve.
With this history the first third of Professor Baker's book concerned, in the second two-thirds he is occupied with the hard task of finding a solution, and here is necessarily controversial. Upon this question, while there is very general agreement that a <dlution should be found, when comes to. methods, tot ' yontes, for seutcutine. We are still jealous of our power of blockade; the. United States, while as desirous, as any country, and more then takes "the very seriously; the United' Sta stil hankers after anc'
Washington Conference en ra? armaments, while France, Italy, and Japan'have declared against any separate consideration of types of armament, limitation, and showing her good faith bya steady and progressive reduction "of her land armament during the past three years, if determined that the ultimate solution Shall find her with a satisfactory, preponderance over Germans, while Germany points to the prelude td the armament clauses of the Treaty of Versailles, which recites tha the reduction imposed on her to be but a first step towards general limitation.
A Doubtful Scheme For this reason, and as a result of our experiences with the Treaty, of Mutual Assistance and Protocol, Iam inclined to be sceptical of the possibility of any, scheme of general and simultaneous limitation, such as Professor Baker advocates. I have come. to believe in Mr, Sidney Webb's "inevitability, of gradualness." It is not easy, to summarize complex proposals ade quately, but, with this caution, Professor Baker's plan may be said to be, for land armaments, thd general application of the kind of limitation in peace strength and equipment which was imposed upon, Germany; for naval armaments general limitation of total tonnage and a supplementary limitation of the tonnage of the most, important types of warships; for aerial armaments a limitation of air fore personnel and a restriction of thd number of permitted pilots. I agree with him that any attempt ta restrict civil aviation would be undesirable, and that the difficulty, which such' aviation constitutes ig not as great as is "commonly posed, It is true that civil planes of certain types could readily converted into bombers but the organization and equipment required to keep an acropland flying in time of war is considers able, and is not behind any civil aviation, A very high authority, informed me recently that the whold of our civil aviation would hardly. enable him to keep one additional war squadron in the air in time of
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.