Rensselaer Semi-Weekly Republican, Volume 34, Number 48, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1902 — Should Spend More For New Warships. [ARTICLE]

Should Spend More For New Warships.

The Navy Department has now given out the figures for the cost of what is called “tke new navy.” From which it appears that since 1883, when the first start was made towards building up a new and efficient navy, there has been SIOO,000,000 expended on new ships, and $10,000,000 in repairing acd remodeling them. This total of $110,000,000 may strike some of our readers, at first thought, as a very large sum, for the purpose. It strikes us as a most pitifully small one. For a nation with the wealth of ours, the commerce of oibrs, the extent of our seaboard; and he fact that our navy is practically our sole military strength for the purpose of a foreign war, the sum is pitifully, disgracefully small. Here we are spending 200,000,000 millions a year on the results of a war that ended almost 37 years ago, and spending it cheerfully and properly; but how niggardly, how narrow minded how contemptibly shortsighted is the policy which refuses to spend more than 5 per cent of what the last war is costing us every year, in protecting the nation against incalculable loss, and no one knows what humiliation, defeat and disgrace, in the next war. And the money expended in building a navy, is not alone to prevent defeat and disgrace in the next war; it is to make it unlikely that there will be any “next war.” And with a people so ambitious, so expansive and so ready to resent, to the last extremity, any aggression or insult from any foreign country as ours, another and a terrible foreign war is as sure to come as the sun is to keep its course—unless we forestall that certainty by building, and building at once, a powerful, and invincible navy. Fifty millions a year is what we ought to spend for at least ten years to come in building and arming and manning new war vessels, and not a dollar less.