While the British make futile and ineffective pleas for disarmament, the nations continue with vast and elaborate plans for increasing their armies and navies. It is by now apparent that the main result of the current English notes will not be to reduce armaments at all but will merely result in the rearming of Germany. The German reply to the French proposals was a distinct defeat for the French, since all that Berlin had to do was to point out that any French demands for disarmament could hardly be anything but inconsistent as long as France insisted upon maintaining her huge war machine and denying Germany the relatively reasonable increases which she requested. Inasmuch as France will probably come out on the short end in any disarmament conference it is to be expected that that country will work to block anything of the sort.

In the meantime Germany enjoys the great advantage of having only a nominal army of only one hundred thousand men, while her actual forces--such as the unofficial Nazi Storm Troops--must amount to many times that number; there is also unmistakable evidence that Germany has been making large importations of war materials and is able to turn her splendid industrial plant to war purposes in a very short time. With Germany rapidly getting back to her prewar military footing, the rest of the world does not lag far behind. France has just completed a vast chain of fortifications across her Eastern frontier; the armies of Balkanized Southern and Central Europe have reached a new peak in efficiency and numbers. Japan has embarked upon a program of naval and military expansion which threatens to bankrupt the government, and yesterday announced that the army was being reorganized and strengthened. Not to be outdone the United States has undertaken a building program which will bring the navy up to full treaty strength and will cost in the neighborhood of four hundred million dollars; nor is the fact that the Civilian Conservation Corps cance. With the largest army in the could be rapidly transformed into an effective fighting force of three hundred thousand men entirely without signifi-world Russia does not need to make any increases; but what is perhaps even more forbidding is the abnormal concentration of troops in the Maritime provinces, which entails an expense that the Soviet can ill afford at the present.

Anyone who looks realistically at the facts in the case can hardly fall to be convinced that any talk about disarmament is the yeriest sort of blather. When 1935 and the end of the Washington Treaty come the true attitude of the powers which now talk so glibly about curtailing their war preparations will be revealed; and the hallucination of disarmament will collapse as thoroughly as did the fiction of a League of Nations not devoted to furthering the opportunism of the Allied Powers, under the stress of the withdrawal of Germany and Japan.