y League alike tell us that
the object of their endeavours is to create an instrument of peace. In
that case their efforts should not be confined to increasing the size of
the respective arms, but should also be directed to determining how and
why and when, and under what conditions, and for what purpose that arm
should be used. And that can only be done effectually if the two bodies
learn something of the aims and objects of the other. The need for a
Navy, and the size of the Navy, depends upon policy, either our own
policy, or the policy of the prospective aggressor; and to know
something of that, and its adjustment, is surely an integral part of
national defence. If both these Navy Leagues, in the fifteen or sixteen
years during which they have been in existence, had possessed an
intelligence committee, each conferring with the other, and spending
even a fraction of the money and energy upon disentangling policy that
has been spent upon the sheer bull-dog piling up of armaments, in all
human possibility, the situation which now confronts us would not exist.

Then each political party of the respective Parliaments might have its
accredited delegates in the Lobbies of the other: the Social Democrats
might have their permanent delegates in London, in the Lobbies of the
House of Commons; the Labour Party might have their Permanent Delegates
in the Lobbies of the Reichstag; and when any Anglo-German question
arose, those delegates could speak through the mouth of the Members of
the Party to which they were accredited, to the Parliament of the other
nation. The Capitalistic parties could have a like bi-national
organisation.

"These are wild and foolish suggestions"--that is possible. They have
never, however, been discussed with a view to the objects in question.
All efforts in this direction have been concentrated upon an attempt to
realize mechanically, by some short and royal road, a result far too
great and beneficent to be achieved so cheaply.

Before our Conferences, official or unofficial, can have much success,
the parties to them must divest their minds of certain illusions which
at present dominate them. Until that is done, you might as reasonably
expect two cannibals to arrive at a workable scheme for consuming one
another. The elementary conceptions, the foundations of the thing are
unworkable. Our statecraft is still founded on a sort of political
cannibalism, upon the idea that nations progress by conqueri