And if too big an army is likely to be a mere encumbrance in war, it is perhaps even a still graver blunder to maintain one during that conflict of preparation which is at present the European substitute for actual hostilities.  It consumes.  It produces nothing.  It not only eats and drinks and wears out its clothes and withdraws men from industry, but under the stress of invention it needs constantly to be re-armed and freshly equipped at an expenditure proportionate to its size.  So long as the conflict of preparation goes on, then the bigger the army your adversary maintains under arms the bigger is his expenditure and the less his earning power.  The less the force you employ to keep your adversary over-armed, and the longer you remain at peace with him while he is over-armed, the greater is your advantage.  There is only one profitable use for any army, and that is victorious conflict.  Every army that is not engaged in victorious conflict is an organ of national expenditure, an exhausting growth in the national body.  And for Great Britain an attempt to create a conscript army would involve the very maximum of moral and material exhaustion with the minimum of military efficiency.  It would be a disastrous waste of resources that we need most urgently for other things.

Sec. 2

In the popular imagination the Dreadnought is still the one instrument of naval war.  We count our strength in Dreadnoughts and Super-Dreadnoughts, and so long as we are spending our national resources upon them faster than any other country, if we sink at least L160 for every L100 sunk in these obsolescent monsters by Germany, we have a reassuring sense of keeping ahead and being thoroughly safe.  This confidence in big, very expensive battleships is, I believe and hope, shared by the German Government and by Europe generally, but it is, nevertheless, a very unreasonable confidence, and it may easily lead us into the most tragic of national disillusionments.

We of the general public are led to suppose that the next naval war—­if ever we engage in another naval war—­will begin with a decisive fleet action.  The plan of action is presented with an alluring simplicity.  Our adversary will come out to us, in a ratio of 10 to 16, or in some ratio still more advantageous to us, according as our adversary happens to be this Power or that Power, there will be some tremendous business with guns and torpedoes, and our admirals will return victorious to discuss the discipline and details of the battle and each other’s little weaknesses in the monthly magazines.  This is a desirable but improbable anticipation.  No hostile Power is in the least likely to send out any battleships at all against our invincible Dreadnoughts.  They will promenade the seas, always in the ratio of 16 or more to 10, looking for fleets securely tucked away out of reach.  They will not, of course, go too near the enemy’s coast, on account of mines, and, meanwhile, our cruisers will hunt the enemy’s commerce into port.