INCREASE OF NAVAL EXPENDITURES.
IT is a fact not pleasant to contemplate in these days of arbitration treaties and peace conferences, that our naval expenditures have increased not less than seven hundred per cent. in the past nineteen years and are likely to increase still more if Secretary Morton's idea and the present naval program are fully carried out, increasing our naval force to forty-eight battle-ships. In 1886 the naval budget was something less than fourteen million dollars. Now the annual outlay has arisen to over one hundred and three millions. During the same period the population of the country has increased less than fifty per cent., and the wealth of the country only one hundred per cent. The present cost of the navy per year amounts to more than six dollars per family for the entire population of the country. In 1886 it was only about one dollar and a quarter per family. The United States, tho still the third naval power, when the ships now building are completed, is building more war vessels at the present time than any European country except Great Britain. We have passed, in this respect, Italy, and Germany, and Russia, and France. In an interview in March, 1904, Senator Frye, President of the Senate, frankly asserted that we must be prepared to lay out two hundred millions a year on the navy. That is at least fifteen millions a year more than the great navy of England now costs. We have now eleven first-class battle-ships, and eleven more have been authorized. The Naval Board proposes to have the number increased to forty-eight. When this is done, and the corresponding ships of other types added—and from the present trend of things there is no doubt that all this will be done—it will then require at least two hundred millions a year to maintain such a navy, without the addition of further ships. From all these considerations there is scarcely a doubt that we shall yet be brought to spend at least three hundred millions a year on the navy before the people awake to see the danger and the folly of the situation. Our increased naval activity will not induce Great Britain to halt in hers. On the contrary she will be provoked thereby to still greater exertions to maintain her supremacy on the sea. Having once entered into this rivalry for naval supremacy, once entered the vicious circle, where will the end be?—Christian Work.