ranks, submit to well-earned retirement or inevitable dissolution, and
allow their places to be taken by other vessels, capable of performing
the duties to which they themselves were no longer adequate.

It is therefore unlikely that there underlay this re-creation of the
navy--for such in truth it was--any more recondite cause than the
urgent necessity of possessing tools wholly fit for the work which
war-ships are called upon to do. The thing had to be done, if the
national fleet was to be other than an impotent parody of naval force,
a costly effigy of straw. But, concurrently with the process of
rebuilding, there has been concentrated upon the development of the
new service a degree of attention, greater than can be attributed even
to the voracious curiosity of this age of newsmongering and of
interviewers. This attention in some quarters is undisguisedly
reluctant and hostile, in others not only friendly but expectant, in
both cases betraying a latent impression that there is, between the
appearance of the new-comer and the era upon which we now are
entering, something in common. If such coincidence there be, however,
it is indicative not of a deliberate purpose, but of a commencing
change of conditions, economical and political, throughout the world,
with which sea power, in the broad sense of the phrase, will be
associated closely; not, indeed, as the cause, nor even chiefly as a
result, but rather as the leading characteristic of activities which
shall cease to be mainly internal, and shall occupy themselves with
the wider interests that concern the relations of states to the world
at large. And it is just at this point that the opposing lines of
feeling divide. Those who hold that our political interests are
confined to matters within our own borders, and are unwilling to admit
that circumstances may compel us in the future to political action
without them, look with dislike and suspicion upon the growth of a
body whose very existence indicates that nations have international
duties as well as international rights, and that international
complications will arise from which we can no more escape than the
states which have preceded us in history, or those contemporary with
us. Others, on the contrary, regarding the conditions and signs of
these times, and the extra-territorial activities in which foreign
states have embarked so restlessly and widely, feel that the nation,
however greatly against its wish, may bec