It is proposed that Great Britain, which is too shabbily poor to give the mass of its own children more than half an elementary education, which cannot house its workers with comfort or decency, which has over a million unemployed, shall spend great sums of money upon a naval establishment at Singapore. This undertaking is just not within the positive prohibitions of the Washington Agreement. It is a few hundred miles west of the area involved in that Agreement. But it is flatly contrary to the spirit of the Washington gathering. It is a frank provocation to crippled and devastated Japan; it dominates the route of the French to Tonkin; it is a contemptuous gesture at any American notions about the “freedom of the seas.” Provided cruisers and battleships are to play a part in the “next war,” it is an admirably chosen position. Let the reader look it up in any atlas and see how its submarines will be able to radiate over the adjacent seas and how all India supports it. It is fairly well placed for air war also. On the supposition that the world is still to go on divided among aggressive sovereign States, with phases of war preparation called peace and acute phases of more and more destructive war, it is quite a good move in the game. On the supposition that the world is growing up to any age of reason and that a world civilisation is attainable, it is a monstrously stupid crime. When I was at the Washington Conference upon the Limitation of Armaments I denounced the French with what many people thought was an extreme bitterness for their reliance upon submarines and Senegalese troops. This British feat at Singapore deserves an equal denunciation. These preparations of the French and British are equally acts of war against the general peace of mankind. It is no good treating the French as though they alone were outraging the unity of mankind with their great armies and equipments. Great Britain, we now see by this crime at Singapore, is just as mischievously and criminally disposed. Both Powers are disturbers of the peace and destroyers of human hope. But when the thing is done by one’s own country and by people we know, one sees more of it and more of the humanity of it than when it happens abroad; and I find a particular figure floating before my mind now whenever I hear or read the word Singapore. He will serve as my type specimen for this aggressive and troublesome British imperialism, and very probably the essential wickedness of French policy finds its embodiment in some quite similar personalities. In which case we are not up against wickedness, but against--what shall I say?--a retardation of mental development.