iate" ship originally devised for
purposes of commerce protection, and dictated by a menace which the
experience of the American War had taught us to respect. The other is the
introduction of the torpedo, and the consequent vulnerability of
battle-squadrons that are not securely screened. Nothing of the kind had
any influence on the fleet constitution of the seventeenth century. But if
we seek deeper, there is a less obvious consideration which for what it is
worth is too striking to be ignored.

It has been suggested above that the constitution of fleets appears to have
some more or less recognisable relation to the prevalent theory of war.
Now, amongst all our uncertainty we can assert with confidence that the
theory which holds the field at the present day bears the closest possible
resemblance to that which dominated the soldier-admirals of the Dutch war.
It was the "Overthrow" theory, the firm faith in the decisive action as the
key of all strategical problems. They carried it to sea with them from the
battlefields of the New Model Army, and the Dutch met them squarely. In the
first war at least their commerce had to give place to the exigencies of
throwing into the battle everything that could affect the issue. It is not
of course pretended that this attitude was dictated by any clearly
conceived theory of absolute war. It was due rather to the fact that, owing
to the relative geographical conditions, all attempts to guard trade
communications were useless without the command of the home waters in the
North Sea, and the truth received a clinching moral emphasis from the
British claim to the actual dominion of the Narrow Seas. It was, in fact, a
war which resembled rather the continental conditions of territorial
conquest than the naval procedure that characterised our rivalry with
France.

Is it then possible, however much we may resist the conclusion in loyalty
to the eighteenth-century tradition, that the rise of a new naval Power in
the room of Holland must bring us back to the drastic, if crude, methods of
the Dutch wars, and force us to tread under foot the nicer ingenuity of
Anson's system? Is it this which has tempted us to mistrust any type of
vessel which cannot be flung into the battle? The recurrence of a
formidable rival in the North Sea was certainly not the first cause of the
reaction. It began before that menace arose. Still it has undoubtedly
forced the pace, and even if it be not a cause, it may w