Disarmament/Freedom of the Seas
By . New York: Coward-McCann. Inc. 1929. Svo. xiii+379 pp. $5.00.
by . the , ., and . New York: Horace Liveright. 1929, Svo. 283 pp. Illus. $4.00.
THESE two books are alike in this: they both end with a programme, Madariaga’s programme is practical and necessary—and it all remains to be done. One would expect this from one of the few adult minds of the generation, possessing fuller information on the subject than any other. The second programme —prescribed to save from itself the Anglo-American coalition that refuses to coalesee — is largely practical, but in every practical particular is in course of being carried out now.
Disarmament as a subject of thought and policy has an overlay of dishonesty, conscious and unconscious, thicker than that insulating any other human institution. Madariaga, with keen mental tools working in a brilliant English style, itself heightened by Iberian elegancia, has scraped away the incrustations, including quantities of philosophical ‘flubdubbery from all quarters, and has proved a classic thesis with true mother wit. The proposition is simple: Nations want their own way, Armaments help them get it, chiefly by bullying without going to war. If war comes, they are of some use, but they are really cherished for the prestige they maintain. Technically, reduction is an insoluble problem in differential guessing, so long as strictly national interests are alone in presence. Therefore, any disarmament conference between states in the present frame of mind is bound to be a conference for the relative increase of the armament of each. ‘The problem of disarmament is not the problem of disarmament. It really is the problem of the organization of the World-Community.’ Running through the facts, which he really knows, the former chief of the Disarmament Section at Geneva makes this clear, divulges the faults of every armed nation, but never drives his rapier of veracity beyond its legitimate mark.
Kenworthy and Young have produced an illusion. They think there is such a thing as the ’freedom of the seas and another called ’command ot the seas. In 200 pages of excellent historical narrative, these illusions are frequently contradicted in their side remarks. All of that is, however, introductory to two big concerns of the authors. Great Britain no longer can afford the biggest navy. America persistently avoids a
Treasury surplus by providing the admirals with ships large enough for their staffs to sleep in beds. There is a rivalry, the makings of an AngloAmerican war.
We are solemnly told that Great Britain cannot keep up the pace; that the Americans are thoroughly peaceful; that both of us may prove to be armed gunmen ’warily eying each other over a poker game’; and we are begged ’to spare the world the spectacle of a rivalry between their protectors and their peacemakers.’ The rest of the world is entitled to ask where the two of us got our commissions to protect it and make its peaces for it.
Historically, there was once a ’command of the seas.’ No one knows what instrument to use for the purpose nowadays. The ’freedom of the seas’ always was a flight of imagination. In times of peace all the seas are free; in any time of war, the only freedom at sea is for the ship that, willy-nilly, gets by a belligerent. We AngloSaxons have done very well under both heads. It is very hard to imagine either that the rest of the world is going to take us two on as its policemen or that either of our Government is going to go out for the job. In practice the Governments get along very well as friends, much better than as twin ‘ bobbies.’ And it is safe to predict that they will maintain their civilian status in the world.
DENYS P. MYERS