and mobilisation, a definition so wide that it includes the greater part of the administration of the navy, especially as the same officer is held responsible for advice on all large questions of naval policy and maritime warfare, as well as for the control of the naval ordnance department.  Thus in each case the very constitution of the office entrusted with the design of operations prevents the officer at its head from concentrating himself upon that vital duty.  The result is that the intellectual life both of the army and of the navy lags far behind that of their German rivals, and therefore that there is every chance of both of them being beaten, not for lack of courage or hard work, but by being opposed to an adversary whose thinking has been better done by reason of the greater concentration of energy devoted to it.

The first reform needed, at any rate in the navy, is a definition of the functions of the First Sea Lord which will confine his sphere to the distribution and movement of ships and the strategical and tactical training of officers, so as to compel him to become the embodiment or personification of the best possible theory or system of naval warfare.  That definition adopted and enforced, there is no need to lay down regulations giving the strategist control over his colleagues who administer materiel and personnel; they will of themselves always be anxious to hear his views as to the methods of fighting, and will be only too glad to build ships with a view to their being used in accordance with his design of victory.  But until there is at the Admiralty department devoted to designing victory and to nothing else, what possible guarantee can there be that ships will be built, or the navy administered and organised in accordance with any design likely to lead to victory?

XIV.

THE NEEDS OF THE NAVY

The doubt which, since the Prime Minister’s statement on the introduction of the Navy Estimates, has disturbed the public mind, is concerned almost exclusively with the number of modern battleships in the Royal Navy.  The one object which the nation ought to have in view is victory in the next war, and the question never to be forgotten is, what is essential to victory?  While it is probably true that if the disparity of numbers be too great a smaller fleet can hardly engage a larger one with any prospect of success, it is possible to exaggerate the importance both of numbers and of the size of ships.

The most decisive victories at sea which are on record were those of Tsusima, of Trafalgar, and of the Nile.  At Tsusima the numbers and size of the Japanese Fleet were not such as, before the battle, to give foreign observers grounds for expecting a decisive victory by the Japanese.  It was on the superior intellectual and moral qualities of the Japanese that those who expected them to win based their hopes, and this view