strength of the new belligerent. Our protective force had to be
increased enormously, while the volume of our trade remained precisely the
same.

This relation of trade defence to terminal and focal areas is of great
importance, for it is in the increase of such areas in the Far East that
lies the only radical change in the problem. The East Indian seas were
always of course to some extent treated as a defended area, but the problem
was simplified by the partial survival in those regions of the old method
of defence. Till about the end of the seventeenth century long-range trade
was expected to defend itself, at least outside the home area, and the
retention of their armament by East Indiamen was the last survival of the
practice. Beyond the important focal area of St. Helena they relied mainly
on their own power of resistance or to such escort as could be provided by
the relief ships of the East Indian station. As a rule, their escort proper
went no farther outward-bound than St. Helena, whence it returned with the
homeward-bound vessels that gathered there from India, China, and the South
Sea whaling grounds. The idea of the system was to provide escort for that
part of the great route which was exposed to attack from French or Spanish
colonial bases on the African coasts and in the adjacent islands.

For obvious reasons this system would have to be reconsidered in the
future. The expansion of the great European Powers have changed the
conditions for which it sufficed, and in a war with any one of them the
system of defended terminal and focal areas would require a great extension
eastward, absorbing an appreciable section of our force, and entailing a
comparatively weak prolongation of our chain of concentrations. Here, then,
we must mark a point where trade defence has increased in difficulty, and
there is one other.

Although minor hostile bases within a defended area have lost most of their
menace to trade, they have acquired as torpedo bases a power of disturbing
the defence itself. So long as such bases exist with a potent flotilla
within them, it is obvious that the actual provision for defence cannot be
so simple a matter as it was formerly. Other and more complex arrangements
may have to be made. Still, the principle of defended areas seems to remain
unshaken, and if it is to work with its old effectiveness, the means and
the disposition for securing those areas will have to be adapted to the new
tactical p