Never has there been so gross, so stupid and needless a sacrifice of moral capital in international relations. I do not see how Mr. Ramsay MacDonald can ever restore the provisional credit the liberal thought of the Latin States had accorded him. The guns of those five cruisers, though not one of them ever materialise and though they will certainly prove obsolete weapons before they can ever be finished, will have blown the prestige of the British Labour Government as a possible European peacemaker to smithereens. I will confess I shared this immense disillusionment. As one who had written and spoken to the text of the Labour programme at the last general election, as one who had explained that the Labour Party at least would have the courage for disarmament and a better use for the taxpayers’ money than battleship building, I did my best to suspend my judgment until the London newspapers came to hand with Mr. Ramsay MacDonald’s speech upon this issue. It seemed impossible that he could have gone the complete Amery he has done. I could not believe that he would not have realised that this thing his Government has done was not a mere parochial extravagance but an act of intense international significance. I expected to find some explanations, some palliations, some apology, that could be put before the foreign observer. I found a speech--the rottenest Old Parliamentary Hand could not have made a more parliamentary speech. It was in two parts: the first part was an ingenious quibble about these ships being merely the replacement of “wastage”--as though the naval equipment of a country was a constant thing that had to be kept up to a standard mark instead of being an incessantly variable thing--and the second was a scarcely veiled admission that the building of these unnecessary and provocative ships was a bribe to the labour in the dockyard constituencies. There was not a word to anticipate the inevitable interpretation of the act abroad; there was not an indication on the part of this astonishing Foreign Minister that the affair would even be observed abroad.