Various rumors of objections to the naval program, now that it had gone to the committee for detailed examination, were said to have been made. There was a disturbing rumor that England wanted the submarine banished from the navies of the world, and that we flatly refused to consider a request which could not but be welcome to the mass of the country, anxious to see not only capital ships scrapped, as had been proposed on the opening day, but auxiliary craft of all sorts. The chief irritation, however, had been over Japan’s strenuous objection to doing away with the greatest of her ships—indeed, the greatest ship afloat, the _Mutsu_. It was just what we might have expected of Japan; her acceptation of the program at the opening of the Conference was a pretense. She was going to object at every point. What the public was still not realizing in regard to the _Mutsu_ was that to Japan it had become a tremendous, almost sacred, symbol. It was a ship designed entirely by the Japanese naval architects, built of materials prepared by Japanese workmen, named for a beloved emperor. The delegation feared to consent to her destruction. So much national pride had been aroused by the great ship that to consent to her destruction might ruin the whole naval program with Japan.
It was hard for Americans to understand any such feeling as this. We have little or no sentiment about any ship, big or little. They mean nothing to us but taxes. We don’t depend upon battleships for safety as an island nation does. There is Japan, a little land all told, Formosa and Korea included, not as large as the state of Texas, with a sea front of over 18,000 miles. Ships mean food, contacts, security to her. When we asked her to sacrifice them we must remember that we were asking much more of her than we were of ourselves though our ratio might have been larger. We must remember the world is not ruled simply by tons of material. Symbols weigh more with nations than tonnage. We could give up our ships without a sigh; but when Japan scrapped hers, something of her heart went with the scrapping.
So far as the _Mutsu_ was concerned, the answer came three days after the agreement over Yap and the Caroline Islands had been made public. On the 15th of December, at six o’clock in the evening, Mr. Hughes staged one of his private rehearsals for the press. It was the decision as to the capital-ship ratio which had been so long expected and which had been settled on the basis that had been proposed on November 12—5–5–3. But, while the ratio had been kept, the details had been changed. Great Britain and the United States had had the good will and the wisdom to recognize that Japan’s feeling about the _Mutsu_ was genuine.