Was it likely that any potential aggressor against Britain or the Empire was going to accept even a limitation on submarine building? We forget, perhaps, the balmy climate of those days, when the soft airs and zephyrs blowing from Geneva had induced the belief—even among hardheaded statesmen and politicians—that we were all on the brink of a new world order. War was to be outlawed, peace and right thinking would prevail. The Americans, with their somewhat Rousseauesque concept of the innate nobility of man, have always been predisposed to this type of optimism. In those immediate postwar years they were absorbed in their dream world of the “big rock candy mountains.”

If they were prepared to agree with Britain on the subject of no limitation on the number of cruisers which might be built, it was only on the condition that the maximum limit should be 10,000 tons with 8-inch guns. From the British point of view this was most unsatisfactory. A greater number of cruisers, of lesser tonnage and more lightly armed, would have served our purpose better.

Optimism reigned in those days, and the atmosphere of Washington was heady with it. This is borne out by such clauses in the treaty as Number 17:

In the event of a Contracting Power being engaged in war, such Power shall not use as a vessel of war any vessel of war which may be under construction within its jurisdiction for any other Power, or which may have been constructed within its jurisdiction for another Power.

Was it conceivable that, in the event of war, any country would have paid attention to such a clause? It might have been better if the treaty discussions had taken place in a more realistic capital, such as London.

Not that London was noticeably clearheaded at the time. Admiral Beatty, aware that behind his back politicians and journalists were supporting the campaign for Britain to give the world a lead in the reduction of armaments, returned to England to lend the weight of his authority to the opposite party. Admiral Chatfield remained behind at Washington to deal with the remaining items on the agenda. Britain owes a great deal to these two Admirals for their dear thinking and hardheadedness during a difficult time.

It was not only the conclusions reached about cruiser building which were a blow to Britain; the most important and far- reaching consequence of the Washington Treaty was the termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance. This alliance had been signed in 1902, and had been designed to contain Russian ambitions in the Far East. Imperial Russia had always pursued the same aims that have subsequently been adopted by Soviet Russia; her interests not being confined to Europe and the Balkans but, then as now, to China, Korea, Japan, and the Pacific. The treaty had provided for mutual assistance in safeguarding British and Japanese interests in China and Korea. It had proved invaluable to Japan during the Russo-Japanese war of 1904, and it had been revised to cover India and Eastern Asia generally a year later. The treaty had resulted in Japan’s immediate entrance into World War I on the Allied side. It had produced other noteworthy results, particularly in terms of Anglo-Japanese friendship, which had made for stabilizing conditions in the Pacific and the Far East. The treaty, as might be expected, was extremely unpopular in China. It was almost equally unpopular in the United States.

One of the factors which must be faced in any history of the twentieth century is that the decline of Britain as a world power owes its origins not only to two disastrous wars, but also to economic and trade rivalry with America. Many Americans disliked the Anglo-Japanese Treaty because they already saw the Pacific as a sphere of American influence. Their business and commercial organizations disliked the predominance of British goods—as well as British ships—in the Far East. Therefore, at the Washington Conference, the strongest pressure was brought upon Britain to abrogate the Anglo-Japanese Treaty, replacing it by a Four Power Pacific Treaty (the United States, the British Empire, France, and Japan). In December 1921 this Four Power Agreement was ratified and the Anglo-Japanese Alliance terminated.

There were many in Britain, of course, who saw the new treaty as thoroughly satisfactory, reducing—as it did—our commitments in the Far East and thus enabling us to carry on with the economies in our services that had been initiated by Sir Eric Geddes. These were the years when a large section of the press and the public saw every Army officer as a “Colonel Blimp,” and every admiral as a ludicrous kind of “Grogram”—both of them equally bent on preserving an absurd old-fashioned institution known as the British Empire. The termination of the Anglo-Japanese Alliance was hardly noticed in the British press at the time. It led ultimately to that American-Japanese rivalry in the Pacific which contributed in no small measure to World War II. The movement of one small stone on a mountain may not be remarked by the villagers living below, but it may sometimes cause a landslide.

There were other disastrous consequences of the Washington Treaty, and none which afflicted the Royal Navy more than the so-called “Ten-Year Rule.” This was a formula for governments, based on the assumption that there would be no major war for at least ten years. It was annually renewed from 1923 until 1932 —by which time the evidence of world events had become dear.

The rule provided a basis for service estimates, and was undoubtedly the major cause for the decline of our fighting power during these years. It weakened the Navy, influenced foreign policy, and was finally to lead, at the London Naval Conference of 1930, to the major stupidity of those interwar years—when Britain agreed to reduce her cruiser strength to parity with the United States. In 1930 the efforts that Admirals Beatty and Chatfield had made to insure that our life lines were not weakened were finally nullified.

The climate of opinion fostered by the Washington Treaty, the Ten-Year Rule, and the conference of 1930 was such that all ships in commission may be said to have suffered equally. By the 1930’s, it had become clear that the Hood needed a major refit to bring her into line with modem conditions of warfare.