Five-Power Treaty is that of one who decides to make the best of a bad job. Her leading statesmen have declared repeatedly that they will not suffer her hands to be tied again in the matter of naval defense. If the most serious differences between French and British policy could be adjusted, if the German Reparations problem could be solved to the satisfaction of both parties, and if France received those guaranties for her future security by which she sets so much store if all this could be accomplished she might then be inclined to lend a more sympathetic ear to proposals for mutual disarmament. But until these conditions are fulfilled it seems worse than futile to approach her on the subject. The almost inevitable result would be a fresh outburst of rage from those influential publicists who professed to see in the Five-Power Treaty a shameful betrayal of French interests and who all but succeeded in having it thrown out by the Chamber. Then would follow an agitation for stronger defenses at sea, culminating, perhaps, in a new programme of submarines and aircraft, the two French weapons of which Great Britain is most apprehensive. In face of such developments the Entente could not survive. A period of open antagonism might ensue, and Europe's last hope of pacification would vanish. Again, therefore, one must register a fervent hope that the British Labor Government's zeal for disarmament will not blind them to the dangers of precipitate action.

IV

As between the United States and Japan the issue is rather more simple. Apart from the immigration controversy there is not, for the time being, any acute political difference of opinion between Washington and Tokyo. The fact remains, however, that the trend

of Japanese naval policy in the postTreaty period has aroused misgivings in the American mind. No one questions Japan's scrupulous observance of the letter of the compact. She undertook to scrap her battleship programme, and she has done so. She has also discarded the older ships which the Treaty required to be sacrificed, and she has discontinued the fortification of islands within the zone affected by Article 19 of the same agreement. What she has not done is to suspend the operation of her eight-eight programme so far as it relates to auxiliary naval craft. The result is that her force of such ships is expanding year by year, and the balance of power in the Pacific which the Treaty aimed to stabilize is thus turning steadily thus turning steadily against the United States, whose fleet of auxiliary ships remains stationary.

The scope and significance of this Japanese auxiliary programme were discussed by the present writer in an article published in the Atlantic for February 1923. His purpose was not to disparage the fruits of the Washington Conference, but to show that Japanese action in continuing to build up a powerful fleet of secondary naval craft must eventually upset the ratios of international strength formulated by the Treaty. This article appears to have given offense in Japan, though the data it presented had been carefully checked, and the conclusions drawn therefrom were, in the writer's judgment, entirely justified by the premises. A detailed reply has since appeared in the Far Eastern Review from the pen of Rear-Admiral K. Nomura, a Japanese officer who was at one time attached to the Embassy in Washington and who served as personal aide to Admiral Baron Kato during the Conference. Describing the Atlantic article as 'the most potent because the most adroit of the several criticisms of the naval treaty

that have been offered,' he submits the following extract as a specimen of its supposedly tendentious character: "To state the case in a sentence: Japan, by diverting to the construction of cruisers and submarines no small part of the energy she formerly expended on capital ships, will soon be in possession of a fleet of "auxiliary combatant" vessels superior in some respects to that of any other power. . . . Japan during the last five years has built or ordered no less than 23 light cruisers, as against a collective total of 16 for Great Britain and the United States.' Commenting on this, Admiral Nomura writes: "The effect of this paragraph is to give a definitely erroneous impression. It is carefully worded, but seems deliberately designed to alarm where no alarm is necessary."

That, of course, is no more than an expression of personal opinion by the Admiral. Since he does not attempt to dispute the figures mentioned in the statement, it is to be presumed that he accepts them as accurate. On his part he submits various tabular surveys of relative naval strength at given periods, one of which shows that Japan, by the end of 1927, will possess 28 cruisers of 171,055 tons, against 10 American cruisers of 75,000 tons, the ratios being 2.2 and 1 respectively. This position may be quite satisfactory to Japan, but the Admiral can hardly expect it to be viewed with equal complacence by the United States. He makes much of the circumstance that when the eight-eight programme of battleships was canceled, the complementary programme of light craft was also modified by deleting one cruiser, 13 destroyers, and 24 submarines, a total of 38 vessels. This seems at first sight a very drastic reduction, but what does it really amount to? We find that the canceling of these 38 vessels has involved a decrease of only 13,395 tons in the

original programme, equivalent to the displacement of two small cruisers. Such is the limited extent to which Japan has reduced an auxiliary fleet that was designed, in the first instance. to serve all the needs of a great battleship force. Since fourteen of the projected battleships were afterward dropped in deference to the Treaty, the tactical necessity for so large a number of ancillary craft ceased to operate, yet Japan has nevertheless continued building them up to within 13,395 tons of the original standard of strength, which postulated an aggregate displacement of 130,000. The net reduction is therefore only about ten per cent.

This disparity between the number of ships canceled and the diminution of tonnage is explained by the fact that all the surviving craft, from cruisers to submarines, have been redesigned on the basis of larger dimensions and greater fighting power. With regard to cruisers and destroyers, though the total number was reduced by 14, the sum of displacement was actually increased by 144 tons. In other words 32 ships of 102,000 tons are now building or on order, in place of the 46 ships of 101,856 tons projected before the Conference. Admiral Nomura seems to have overlooked the damaging significance of his own figures! So far from disproving the case presented in the Atlantic article, they confirm and strengthen it. Only in respect of submarines has any positive reduction been made in Japanese naval shipbuilding since the Treaty. Here we find a substantial cut in the programme, from which 24 boats of 13,539 tons have disappeared. The surviving 22 will all be of large design, and their completion four years hence will bring the Japanese underwater flotilla up to 69 units ocean-going boats without exception, and all less than ten years old from date of completion. Numeri

In the great sea-fight at Actium when the combined fleets of Mark Antony and Cleopatra contended for the empire with the forces of Octavian, Antony's ship, it is said, unaccountably slackened speed and then, in defiance of the wind in its spreading sails, in defiance of hundreds of slaves bending to their oars, stood still. A diver, examining the hull, brought up a little fish of a variety which, according to general belief at that time, by attaching itself to a hull could hold the largest ship motionless on the water. Even to this day, in fact, it is a well-known species with a remnant of its ancient fame still perpetuated in the dictionaries by the name of remora (delayer) and in the zoölogies by the specific name of naucrates or conqueror of ships. This belief was not confined to the ignorant populace; it was entertained by the best intellects of that time, by Lucan in his Pharsalia and by Pliny the Elder, himself commander of a fleet as well as the most noted observer of animal life in the whole his

tory of ancient Rome: 'What is more violent than the sea and the winds? What greater work of art than a ship? Yet one little fish can hold back all their fury and can hold back all these when they all strain the same way. The winds may blow, the waves may rage, but this small creature controls their fury and stops a vessel when chains and anchors would not hold her, and that it does, not by hard labor, but merely by adhering to her.'

A fable, so out of keeping with modern thought that no one would now believe it, found at that time no one to deny it, because in that age there was a universal failure to understand that physical energy is quantitative and measurable that the great force of a large body is not to be controlled by a little thing and feeble, 'merely by adhering to' it. In contemplating the physical universe we have made appreciable advance, but it is possible that after some centuries the record of our thinking on social phenomena will be treated by the historian of science in

For a series of years ending in 1917 the powers of the American government - legislative, executive, and judicial were exerted toward destroying a reputed agency of oppression, a plunderer of the people, which had its seat in the town of Elgin, Illinois, west of Chicago, and which was said to reach out its strangling tentacles to the extremities of the nation. That town had years before been the centre of trade in dairy products for the rich farming-country round about; an organized market in butter had grown up there and become widely famous and its quotation of prices was recognized in all the butter markets of the nation. In time it quite lost importance as a butter market but still continued to be, even more than most markets for farm products, an object of denunciation on the ground that its Butter Board 'fixed the price of butter.' Congressmen, farm papers, and miscellaneous editors thundered to right and to left of it. It gave occupation to Federal Grand Juries and, in April 27, 1914, a decree of the United States District Court in Chicago condemned the officers and members of the Elgin Board of Trade on the ground that they 'heretofore formed, and at the time of the filing of the petition were parties to, a combination and conspiracy to restrain interstate trade and commerce.' The officers and members of the Board were accordingly forbidden to engage in the said conspiracy by fixing and publishing prices, unless these prices grew out of bona fide sales of butter.

In 1917, at the request of the Food Administration, the Elgin Board ceased operations. If we explore the depths to find out what manner of organization this is that fixes the prices of a commodity so widely bought and sold,

States District Attorney, who went out from Chicago and recommended that it be closed, described its operations. From January 6 to June 16, 1917, it met once a week with average attendance of four traders and average sales of 51 tubs of butter. From the first of August to the first of November all the sales, with two exceptions, were made by a man named Moles and a man named Christian. For example, August 4, Christian sold Moles 25 tubs at 38 cents. August 11, Christian sold Moles 50 tubs at 40 cents. August 25, Christian bid 41 cents for 100 tubs, no offers and no sales. September 1, no sales. For years Elgin had ceased to be a butter market of importance; the meetings and the publication of prices seem to have been continued because some people in the neighboring territory, and also from Baltimore south, preferred the quotations from force of habit. The committee was substantially a statistical board to furnish information as to market conditions. As a source of information it was unsatisfactory and might have been misleading, but its suppression was explained and justified on other grounds. The Board was prosecuted, not for fraud, not, for example, on a charge of using the mails to defraud, but for exercising, or at least threatening, a dominant influence over prices to the injury of the consuming public.

The New York Times an organ not inferior in intelligence to the average citizen announced in a telegram from a Chicago correspondent that this formidable agency 'practically fixed the price of butter for the United States.' That is to say, the great currents of trade in that commodity, as it moved to the central markets and out again to the consumers, urged on by the imperious necessity of the producers to sell, drawn by the desire of