NATIONAL INSURANCE.
The recent revelations regarding the insufficiency of our naval armaments have naturally caused the public to ask, with a degree of anxiety proportioned to the present complicated nature of our foreign relations, What, failing our navy, are the means of national defence that we have to fall back upon? The answer, even when it comes from the mouth of a departmental Minister, is not reassuring; when it is returned by independent military authority, it is gloomy in the extreme. If our navy in its present condition cannot count for much, our coast and inland defences must go for less, in fact for nothing, in the presence of a strong and determined enemy. From time to time the subject has been raised; a certain amount of alarm has been created; the usual reassurances given; some steps towards action promised, which generally get no further than the formulation of plans on paper; and then the matter drops, until, after an interval of years, the public mind is again aroused to the fact that the country is still just as defenceless as it was before. So it has been, and so, it is to be feared, it will be, until some fatal experience has emphatically taught us the consequences of our neglect, when the hour has gone by for remedying it. It is well, however, to take advantage of those rare moments when the country, brought face to face with the facts of its position, finds its national optimism somewhat rudely shaken, and condescends to look at its own situation from a broader platform than that afforded by party representations.
Party government, in spite of the many advantages it secures to the country, is the cause of serious inconveniences and dangers. The special dangers to which it is wished now to direct attention are the unsatisfactory condition in which the defences of the empire are kept, and the incomplete and in many respects inefficient state in which our military forces are maintained. No Government, whether Liberal or Conservative, would probably be able to obtain sufficiently large annual grants from the House of Commons, for the years that would be necessary, to allow of the naval and military resources of this country being put on a proper footing. Even if any comprehensive scheme, to be spread over several years, but dependent on annual votes for funds, were to be sanctioned by the Government now in power, there would be no security that the scheme would not be dropped, either by its original promoters or by their successors in office, when either party could make a bid for votes by effecting retrenchments in public expenditure. Since the present Liberal Government has been in power, important fortifications in progress at a foreign station, which had been deliberately planned and approved of, were stopped for no other reason than to save money. Such an unfortunate state of affairs is probably inseparable from the ordinary course of party government in any Anglo-Saxon community. The Americans are very much the same as ourselves, and neglect even more that we do the proper consideration of defensive measures. They, however, can afford to be careless in these matters without incurring any serious risks, as they are far distant from any
